[Peter Graham]

I'd say definitely yay, but use a light touch.

Accents and dialogue can, in my view, help characterisation to a certain point, but go beyond that point and you undo all of the good work. If deciphering the accent means that the reader has to break their flow, you have probably gone too far.

The light touch can be expressed in a couple of ways:-

1. The odd word. This is what I prefer. Just slot in the odd dialect word or phonetic spelling of a word. Enough to give the reader the flavour without making a piece too difficult to read.

"I'm going to jump that gate" (standard English)

"I'm goin' ter lowp yon yat" (actual phonetic rendition of rural Cumbrian)

"I'm goin' ter jump that gate" (light touch).


2. Use of cod accents. This is more common, but less convincing, in my view. There are a number of uber-accents that crop up time and time again, such as the big fat Texan drawl ("hey, y'all"), the sassy New York twang (in which "coffee" invariably comes out as "kwarfy"), the cheeky Londoner ("gorblimey guv'nor"), the tartan Scot ("hoots mon") or Oirish (punctuate with "bejaysus" and use word order of the sort favoured by Yoda).

Actual speakers of any of these accents will rightly say that they are hopelessly inaccurate, but they are at least recognisable to a reader. In many ways, they can be hard to avoid if you are doing accents in your book - very few people can properly render accents other than their own.

Regards,

Peter