An exercise in writing dialogue: 24 English accents in 8 minutes

One way to distinguish characters on the page is how they speak. Here is a great example as this young Brit uses 24 English accents in 8 minutes:

While writers have to be careful in tweaking words in dialogue to convey dialect — bottom line, it has to be readable — a little can go a long way in helping different characters come across as different personalities. 

In fact, a helpful exercise is to go into public, record people in casual conversation, then transcribe their words into script form. It’s interesting to see the way in which people talk, often considerably different than how we imagine dialogue to sound.

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