ENGL 2920 Lecture 9: Week 9
24 Feb 2016
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Adds to the readers knowledge of the situation. Reveals something about the speaker"s personality, both directly and indirectly (through subtext i. e what is not being said) Not necessarily realistic, you want to make it sound natural but it doesn"t mean that it is natural. Pay attention to the lengths of the sentences so it sounds like the kind of thing that a person could say in a single breath. Make it consciously ungrammatical, the way people really do speak. Good dialogue needs to be extremely specific. Avoid having characters talking in abstractions and generalities such as, i think i"m in love with you darling. Each character should speak differently, have a distinct way of phrasing, distinct opinions. If they are frightened they might try to placate. What dialogue is not: not an important source of facts about a piece, not good for describing people, places or objects, not a substitute for direct narrative.
