How it gets said #3: Syntax, grammar, and typography

Syntax is the arrangement or sequence of words in a sentence – for example, whether one writes “Something wicked comes this way” or “Something wicked this way comes.” The order in which one places the words and phrases can be a subtle indicator of emphasis (or de-emphasis) on a particular element, or a clear and obvious way of showing certain types of accent. Some regional dialects include specific syntax, like the Pennsylvania Dutch “Throw your father out the window his hat.”

Syntax is especially useful for indicating non-native speakers. Most people who learn a second language start mastering vocabulary before they get the hang of things like word order, and a sentence with slightly non-standard word order is almost always a lot easier to read and comprehend than a sentence with lots of words that have been phonetically respelled to indicate a foreign pronunciation. For example:

• -Must we help with his stupid move again?
• -Must we with his stupid move again help?
• -Must we again help with his move stupid?

The first is typical English; the second is German word order; the third is French. It should be fairly clear just from this much that the second and third speakers are not native English speakers, even if it is difficult to identify, from this single sentence, exactly which language they do originally speak.

When working with real languages, like French or Japanese, it is almost a necessity to have some familiarity with the language you are trying to represent in English, or the “scrambled” syntax will not actually reflect the syntax of the original language. Do not rely on online translators; this is one of the things they still get wrong fairly commonly. If you don’t know the language yourself, find someone who does and get them to double check.

Writers also use alternate syntax and grammar to indicate non-native English speech in fantasy and SF, where the “native language” of the speaker is not real. Here, one can come up with a specific sentence pattern for each “alien language” and apply it. Possibly the most famous example is Yoda – “Patience you must have. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they.”

Scrambled or non-standard grammar is, essentially, an extension of non-standard word order (or you can think of non-standard word order as a subset of non-standard grammar). Real life has plenty of examples of non-standard constructions that reflect everything from social class (for example, the use of “ain’t” and double negatives) to dialect (as the Appalachian “I might could have done,” used extensively in Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories). Imaginary grammar, like non-standard word order, can be used to present alien accents, as Keith Laumer did in many of his Retief stories. Here are examples of three kinds of his aliens:

• -To skip the apologies! To dispose of the invaders instantly!
• -Us better slice them up quick-quick. They getting fast-fast with they clubs.
• -I hear this! I outrage! You are gave one minutes, Eastern Standard Time, for total abandon of vicinity!

Typography encompasses all the various ways letters can be formed on the page, including everything from different fonts to italics, boldface, and size changes. The most famous of that last is probably “The Mouse’s Tail” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the words are positioned to form a wiggly tail on the page, and the font gets smaller and smaller as it nears the “tip” of the “tail.” My editor used the same technique – shrinking the font – in Dealing with Dragons: when they melt Antorell, his dialog shrinks as he does.

Most publishers discourage authors from playing around with the more extreme examples of typography (like squashing all the letters of a word together, or changing fonts) because until recently they made books much more expensive to typeset. Nowadays, computers have eliminated that problem, but created a new one: not all screens or readers will display different typographical styles.

As a result, the most commonly used typographical changes are italics (for emphasis), all caps (for shouting) and, occasionally, bold face or underlining. Some writers use a tilde (~), parentheses, asterisks, etc. instead of quotation marks to indicate alternatives such as characters speaking in a foreign language or communicating telepathically. Direct internal dialog is often rendered in italics to distinguish it from spoken dialog. There are other uses for typographical changes in narrative, but I’m skipping those for now because I’ve been talking about dialog.

Typographical changes usually need to be used with a very light hand, or dialog becomes unreadable and/or difficult to follow. The exception would be a minor character who constantly uses a lot of emphasis in their speech, though clearly only when they think they have good reason. (I’d only do this with a minor character, though, because that speech pattern usually goes along with being talkative, and it would drive me [and presumably any readers] crazy to have a major character talk like that for the whole book.)

Note that all of the things I’ve talked about – word choice, punctuation, word order, syntax, and typography – work together in dialog all the time. It is not enough to assign a particular vocabulary or syntax to a specific character; the writer still uses punctuation and word order and occasional italics to reflect the way those words are delivered on the page.

Next up is what’s happening around the dialog – that is, speech tags, body language, and stage business.