Dialogue 3rd Grade
Cre Moonin
I said, "This unit is awesome! It is just what I need to review and re-enforce much needed punctuation skills.Loving the past part!" This would be a fun, motivating way to work on this skill. Great packet!
"The worst thing about teaching second graders about quotation marks is too many random quotation marks popping up everywhere. She might lose her mind or remind herself that "they'll get it in third grade" to feel better about skipping it," said the veteran teacher, hoping to win this pack to alleviate some of that random quotation mark stress.
This is my first column with TLT, so let me introduce myself. I am Angela Frederick. I have worked with youth as a librarian in both public libraries and K-12 school libraries. I have served on multiple book committees on the state level and with the American Library Association. Most recently I chaired the 2021 and 2022 Best Graphic Novels for Children committee, which is sponsored by the Graphic Novels and Comics Roundtable (GNCRT). In this column I will share book lists on particular topics as well as reviews of upcoming comics written for middle grade and YA.
Angela Frederick is a high school librarian in Tennessee. She has worked in school and public libraries since 2005. She is the former chair of the Best Graphic Novels for Children committee, sponsored by the Graphic Novels and Comics Roundtable of the American Library Association.
The dialogues are a way for students and board members to exchange views and ideas. Students speak about an array of issues that are important to students, board members and school districts throughout the county.
The New Jersey School Boards Association, a federation of boards of education, provides training, advocacy and support to advance public education and promote the achievement of all students through effective governance.
Are your characters even real if they're not moaning about the bad habits of their friends? Where an adult might not vocalise their thoughts, children don't hold back so make sure this comes across in your dialogue.
Me and my two best friends are guilty of teasing each other to no end. It's one of the many ways we show our love for each other and we have been like this our whole lives. I think this is a great way for your dialogue to feel fresh for your target audience.
This was a phrase that survived the copy-editing stage! And I was very glad about that. Although fromage-sniffer might've not been an officially recognized phrase in the 1920s, both words still existed at this time. So why not mash them together? It shows the humour between Bastien and his best friend, Theo, and how they have their own words, a type of secret language.
I am hugely inspired by my lovely, inquisitive nephew Joe. He is only four years old, but he has already mastered the art of exaggeration. If he has a sip of super milky coffee, because he wants to be just like his uncle, he will claim it is 'the best, most delicious drink he has ever tasted. Ever. In the history of hot drinks.' He has mastered hyperbole without even knowing what it is.
Clare Povey is the author of The Unexpected Tale of Bastien Bonlivre, a middle grade mystery adventure set in 1920's Paris. Clare grew up on the border of where East London meets Essex. After studying French and living in Northern France to teach English in primary schools, she joined the Writers & Artists team at Bloomsbury Publishing to grow their writing and publishing events and is now Editorial & Communities Manager at W&A.
I have written the first draft of a Middle Grade detective adventure in the vein of Enid Blyton's Famous Five or Astrid Lindgren's Bill Bergson. In my novel, the protagonist, a boy from England, is on holidays in France. He befriends a French boy, and together they solve a crime.
The English boy has learned French in school for a year, and a small part of the story is how he first struggles and later manages to communicate with the locals. Since the French boy doesn't speak English, much of the dialogue in my first draft is in French.
When I began to write, I liked the idea of showing the difficulties of getting along in a foreign country with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language. But now I believe that such a book is basically unpublishable. There are a few books for language learners that have foreign language dialogue in English text, but they are for more advanced learners and have more foreign language dialogue than my book has. Also, not every child learns French, and my audience would be severely limited. Therefore I want to revise the text and write all the dialogue in English.
"Dad, this is Jean," Charlie introduced his new friend to his father.
"Hello, Jean," Charlie's father greeted Jean in French.
"Hello, Mr. Miller," Jean replied, and then added in strongly accented English: "Nice to meet you."
A few questions on this site deal with how to represent foreign language in fiction. But that's not the problem I have. I know how I want to represent foreign language (in italics). What I want to know is:
I have never read a Middle Grade novel where the protagonist had to speak in a foreign language for most of the story. There is a lot of adult fiction where the protagonist has to get along in a foreign language environment (e.g. James Clavell's Shōgun or some science fiction stories), but maybe in Middle Grade fiction it is unsellable. Should I get rid of the foreign language problem subplot completely (and choose options 1 or 2)?
I have already decided not to write the dialogue in French. The question is which of the three options outlined above would be the best choice when it comes to marketability and increasing sales. None of the options contain any French dialogue!
What I miss in the answers I have recieved, is a source that substantiates that the proposed option is the best (or the sensible one). Sources could be examples from successfully published Middle Grade books, or a statement by a person from the publishing industry on this or a comparably similar matter.
There's another option which I think combines the best options of each: Initially treat French as unintelligible, then when the protagonist learns French, don't treat it as a separate language.
Later, once the protagonist has learned French, establish that other characters only speak French, then you won't need to reference the fact that they're speaking French every time. You can just write "I agree," Pierre replied and it should be clear to readers, especially if you reinforce a few times that the other characters are speaking another language.
Instead, I would do what television shows do and have the 'foreigner' speak English with an 'accent', occasionally getting it wrong and using some unusual grammar. I understand that accent is hard to do in writing but it can be done.
As someone who read a lot of Comic Books, this trope comes up and is usually handled by a format of an additional unusual punctuation mark and a note at the first use of what language was being used such that...
Please note that the quotation mark with in the less than sign is deliberate to escape issues with using the less than/greater than on this web page, specifically that they are used as part of the HTML code for formatting block quotes.
You could use the "Replied In French" quote you provided, I'm just demonstrating the use in comics. There is one problem that you don't have in comics, but what happens if we add a third character, Hans, who speaks German and wants to ask what Jean is saying... Comics deal with this by changing the color of the speech bubble background (So Charlie has White, Jean has Blue, and Hans has Red) but it's really hard to do that in a novel. Perhaps you could change the the symbol to a [] for Hans or a . Just keep the symbol and language associated with the change separate. K.A. Applegate's Animorphs series of novels series dealt with limited telepathic communications and denoted the communications with a and no quotes. She would later introduce characters who were full telepaths and denoted the more forceful telepathic speech with the and then underlying all the words inside the dialog.
This is better than italicizing changed dialog as italicizing is difficult to spot and for the readers to notice it consistently. Once the language is assigned by "Jean replied in French" the dialog can continue without having to note that the convention has changed. It also implies that the sentance is correctly spoken, which means you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is what I call "Hagrid Dialog" after the J.K. Rowling character from Harry Potter, who's dialog was peppered with deliberate misspelt words to make an accent. At times, it can be difficult to understand what Hagrid was saying... or another character who used a different set of misspellings to affect a different accented English.
As a final note, one of my favorite writing gags is that when a character with an American Accent and a character with a British Accent are sharing dialog, I denote the accent by using the British spelling of the words in the Brit's dialog. The American uses the American spelling, as does the narrator, who is basically speaking in my own vernacular.
I don't think its a bad thing to acknowledge bi-bilingualism to children as the United States does have a need for more bilingual speakers and with languages, its easier to learn young than old. One of my favorite writers in children's television, Greg Weisman, is a wonderful advocate for this and says one of his big creative regerts was not showing two Japanese characters speaking in subtitled Japanese until the English Speakers showed up, in which they switched to English Dialog. He has since made up with this in his later shows, such as Spectacular Spider-man and Young Justice (which even went so far as to make a constructed languages for Atlantean and Interlac, the latter being a one to one substitution cipher of the Latin Alphabet and English words.).
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