The popular reception of Mark Twain’s writings prompted critics to view the depiction of colloquial speech in literary texts as legitimate art, enhancing realist, modernist, and contemporary fiction. Yet such depictions require caution, for non-literary forms, when mingled with literary discourse, pose significant stylistic concerns.
Oral discourse, and the modes often associated with it--movies, television, and modern theater, for example--convey immediacy and emotion, characterized by pause fillers, emphatic intonations, and street slang. Literary texts, on the other hand, connote cautious, planned, respectable language, the hallmark of intellectual society. The polarity extends further: composed of the best in language and thought, literature enjoys elite patrons and political prestige, such that many scholars to consider it a yardstick of culture. However, decades of technological and cultural change have eroded the distinction between literary and non-literary discourse. In the era of texting and emojis, steadfast adherence to literary convention risks archaic formality.
Knowing the forms orality takes in writing can help writers make more conscious sentence-level choices. Quotes, perhaps the most obvious conversational marker, represent a decision to distance quoted material from the surrounding authorial voice. Responsibility for the material, the quotes imply, belongs elsewhere. Quotation marks, then, serve an important rhetorical function. Employing them signifies a choice to call on outside voices, mingling a text’s literary quality with conversational elements that, depending on context, may indicate the writer’s deference to authority (and, by extension, intellectual private property) or create distance between the author and statements deemed unfit for direct association.
To the extent that quotation marks signify extra-textual language, we may regard them as conversational. However, not until the post-Twain era did writers develop informal conversation as a literary trope. To glimpse the formality with which prior authors treated conversation, we might highlight the 18th Century literary figure Samuel Johnson, whose biographer recorded conversations not in an immediate, emotional manner, but rather in planned aesthetic sentences. Presenting conversation according to the literary standards of the day, the biographer (Boswell) eschewed the conversational markers (italics, pause fillers, fragments, etc.) that pervade modern texts. By contrast, modern writers embrace features considered too informal by 18th Century standards. Italics, for example, disrupt the visual uniformity of text in a way that suggests drama and emphasis. Pay attention to this, they convey! Since writing offers other means of emphasis, such as placing new information at the end of a clause, italics constitute a decision to favor the immediacy of oral markers. Beyond italics, writers might employ additional techniques. Running words together (“whodunnit” for example) brings the hurried pace of oral discourse to a text by calling our attention not to the word but to the phonetic qualities of rapid speech. Insofar as phonetics denote sound, foregrounding them implies a choice to create urgency via nonliterary means. Similarly, the emotional tone suggested by fragments (i.e. “yummy!”) and the mental stumbles suggested by pause fillers (“um,” “well”), when written, bring emotional immediacy, imbuing the text with an improvised, even frenetic, tone.
The markers discussed above present a key stylistic concern for writers. Emphasizing a conversational tone through oral text markers often means denying the use of literate methods. When a writer foregrounds orality to excess, so that, as with strung-together words, the text unintentionally reads like a comic book, readers may conclude the writer lacks control. Accordingly, recognizing the features of both literary and oral discourse can help writers more fully appreciate how mode affects meaning. Once chosen, a mode involves expectations and requirements. Just as graffiti requires an illicit canvas, and loses its counter-culture impact if transmitted via Morse code or communicated through a TV commercial, so must writing intended as literature adhere to the expectations of the literary mode. Here the aesthetics of the pre-Twain eras retain their value: while conversational markers can enhance a writer’s literary toolkit, they can’t in themselves substitute for literature.
