A Guest Post by Chuck Litka
Like most self-published authors, I publish one English edition for the world. This means that some readers will find words spelled differently, or, dare I say, “wrong.” Or “wrong”. Since, in British English, the period goes outside of the quotation mark. Some readers will also have to translate, if they can, the different English terms for the same item, i.e. cookies vs biscuits, hood vs bonnet. And of course, every region of English speakers and readers have their own phrases and speech patterns, who may find my English off kilter and perhaps, hard to follow. While I don’t see this as a major problem, publishing one version worldwide does has its little issues.
However, if you look at it a little cross-eyed, you can find a silver lining in these little issues. If you’re always going to be wrong somewhere in the world, why not take advantage of that fact? Why not adopt parts of the different Englishes and use them to your advantage? For instance, in British English, unlike American English, you don’t use periods behind Mr or Mrs or any such title. Since that period tells the reader nothing they don’t already know, why waste a keystroke to clutter up your sentence with a useless period in the middle of it? It’s merely a regional convention, and you’re publishing for the world. I’ve eliminated those useless periods.
Adopting different spellings is a lot more risky, since there are readers out there laying in wait to pounce on any preconceived misspellings, especially if you try to mix and match conventions. However, I use the British “grey” rather than the American “gray” because “grey” brings to my mind a sharp, clear color, be it dove grey or battleship grey. Whereas “gray” brings to mind the murky, muddy color of the clay I used to play with as a child. However, beyond that, well, I was (rightly) dinged for my typos, wrong words, and misspellings in my early editions, so I don’t care to venture too much deeper into that potentially dark valley. However, I could see using the British spelling of words for a British character, while using American English for an American character just to add color to the characters. In my stories with British narrators, I turned on the British English spellchecker and used the British spellings, plus as many British terms as I could, though I likely fell woefully short in the latter, given my rather distant view of that variety of English.
And, as I mentioned, there are all those different terms in American and British English for common things. These can be more easily mixed in than the different spellings. I usually use “lift” instead of “elevator” and “flat” instead of “apartment” simply because I like them better, for whatever reason. On the flip side, there are words that mean two different things, for instance, “jumper” which is a sweater in British English, and a dress of sorts in American English, which you might not want to substitute. Still, if we are writing for the world, why not write for the world and use all the English we have at our disposal?
The British convention that I adopted right from the beginning is the single quotation mark – ‘’ – for dialogue, rather than the American double quotation mark – “” – for three reasons.
First, it works just fine. It’s largely invisible. No reader has ever complained about my use of the single quotation marks. And you know they would, if it bugged them.
Secondly, I think that it makes sentences look more streamlined – more elegant. That is just my opinion, of course, but I like how it does the job in a nice, understated way.
And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it saves me time, effort, and perhaps some pain as well. I don’t have to stretch and hunt for the shift key for every quotation mark and use two keystrokes for it.
I like to do things efficiently, and hitting one key instead of two for every quote makes my writing just a little more efficient. Of course, I still have to hit the shift key for the capital letter that follows the first quotation mark, but I’m pressing it down for a beat less, and the quotation mark at the end is a pure win. All these tiny movements in typing, repeated millions of times, add up. While I’ve avoided carpal tunnel syndrome so far, I still find that by the end of a final draft of a story, I can feel a bit of soreness in my left pinky finger, my shift key finger, despite using the single quotation mark.
It is said that the English language is the richest language in the world. As writers of English for the world, why not embrace the full scope of English and explore how we can enrich our English from this treasure trove. And, perhaps, save a few keystrokes along the way.
What do you think? What English conventions do you use in your writing? Have I missed some neat English tricks for efficiency and elegance? Or, on the other hand, do you see problems that I don’t in mixing and matching Englishes?
I am an amataur author. I write just for the fun of creating. I’ve enjoyed writing all my life, eventually taking the plunge into self-publishing in 2015. While most of my novels are old fashioned romances — adventures in exotic imaginary worlds, I have written something of a romance, and have just completed something of an old fashioned whodunit. I’m looking to write a Gothic style story next.
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