Americans....

[meridian_rose]

I received a review on an older fic - it's always nice to get comments on older fics, and fics in small fandoms, and this was both. However the writer was under the impression that there were "minor spelling and grammar" errors. Now this is a fic that I edited before posting to AO3, but which has never been beta read. So I copied and pasted the AO3 version into Word to have another look.

I found I'd used portacabin when I mean the propriety term Portakabin. Fair enough. Maybe it was because I used some non-standard words within the dialogue, "lemme see" rather than "let me see" as a nod to a character's speech patterns. I couldn't find any other errors. Then I thought, oh-oh.



Changing the text from UK to US in Word showed up a whole lot of "errors", eg favourite, neighbour. However these are not errors in my work. I try to have characters use the correct terms "elevator" rather than "lift", for example, if the character is American. But I'm British, and I write a variety of characters, fandoms, and original works, and I am not going to start spelling words without a u in them "Because America".


Team America: World Police. "It's okay, we got the terrorists!"

Do I need to have the spelt vs spelled debate again?



#yesIknow #notallAmericans #BritishEnglish

Comments

[silk_dragon_zen]

Normally I can't stand spelling snobbery except in one context: if my screen-reader can't pronounce it, we have a *big* problem. That said, my screen-reader always pronounces U.K. spellings correctly.

Also, how can people be well read and not have encountered U.K. spellings in books? I mean, for heavens' sake, the last four Harry Potter books, I am told, were not altered when published over here, after fans like my sister and I complained about it. I have a complete set of U.K. editions of HP (alas, not all of them hard back) because my sister bought the first three for me as a gift from a shop in Canada because she didn't want me to have to endure the irritation of Americanisms in an otherwise British story.

[meridian_rose]

Somebody commented at LJ that it's often readers who are not writers, who make these sort of ill-informed comments. To which I agreed it is possible, even likely, but surely that means these are readers who are not at all well-read, if they have never have encountered British spellings! "Harry Potter" is a good example of a mainstream work, as are the Sherlock Holmes stories. I cannot fathom how someone looks at a fic and decides all those words with a "u" in them are misspellings. As another commenter pointed out, it's not hard to Google something to check on it before you accuse a writer of having made a mistake!

[silk_dragon_zen]

Well, it's not hard for *most* people to Google things — if I thought I were seeing many mistakes, it wouldn't occur to me to Google any of them since Googling is a little spoon-intensive for me — but I take your point.