On Casual Language, Part 1: Why Being Formal is Cool
The moment a book is first picked up, the reader and the author are joined in a kind of unwritten agreement. The author requires the attention of the reader; while the reader trusts that the author has written the book in such a way as to keep his or her attention. But it is a buyer’s—or a reader’s—market. Considering the vast quantity of options available for their entertainment, an author must take pains to provide the best possible product.
An easy, and easily fixed, way for an author to lose their reader’s attention is if they are too casual in their writing. Books aren't text messages or emails. They aren't memes, TikToks, or Reddit threads. People expect a book to be more than these things; in a word, they expect books to be more formal.
Now, before you accuse me of being a prig or a snob, let me give you some examples of what I mean. On a certain level, I’m simply talking about getting rid of the really casual words and phrases, like the following.
“cuz” (as in “because”)
“k” (as in “okay”)
“yay!”
“gonna” (as in “going to”)
“lol”
“omg”
“stoked” (this is acceptable for the dialogue of a stoner, or a Californian, or possibly a Coloradian, and for no-one else)
“super” (as in, for example, “She was super sad.”)
This list is far from comprehensive, but you get the idea. Use real words.
In my experience, this problem exists most often in memoirs. When writing about themselves, I find, people get skittish, and vacillate between the narrative they want to tell—usually told in a regular way, with full sentences and proper language—and a kind of “commentary” on the narrative, generally written in a less “formal,” and less good, way, that feels better suited to a private journal, or indeed, nowhere.
I don’t know why people do this; I could guess, but I’m not a psychologist. In any event, your audience wants your story, or your narrative. They don’t want your commentary on it. Leave that to the judgement of others.
As I’ve said before, and as I will say again and again, the goal of the practitioner of writing is to create the illusion of authenticity. To achieve this, certain conventions must be followed. While there may be some freaks who enjoy a bossa nova song, which every now and then, cuts into a few seconds of Norwegian death metal, most people prefer one or the other.
As I’ve said before, and as I will say again and again, the goal of the practitioner of writing is to create the illusion of authenticity. To achieve this, certain conventions must be followed. While there may be some freaks who enjoy a bossa nova song, which every now and then, cuts into a few seconds of Norwegian death metal, most people prefer one or the other.
And yet it’s not just about the reader’s preference. Maintaining a kind of stylistic consistency, or a narrative’s formal quality, allows the author to express what they want to express more effectively. The point is to use the tools available to you—language— to ground the reader more firmly in the world of your story, making your story more real for the reader, and therefore more enjoyable and meaningful.
This is not to say that, when writing fiction, you should not use text messages, or emails, or even TikTok’s. If your book is set in the present day, then it would be ludicrous not to. Richard Yates by Tao Lin is an excellent example of this idea, taken to an extreme. The story of that novel takes place almost entirely within a Gchat conversation—Gmail’s texting function, now I believe, extinct—of its two protagonists.
But while these characters use “casual” language, the novel itself was planned and executed in a decidedly formal way. With Richard Yates, Tao Lin had an idea, and he saw it through. In other words, he planned to be casual. The point is that, as an author, you must make a plan and stick to it. Just to hammer this point home: it’s okay to use informal, or casual, language. But you can’t have 85% of your book written one way, and 15% of your book written like a teenager’s DMs. Choose one or the other.
At the heart of the issue is fear, manifested in a kind of laziness. Perhaps the author believes that, by interspersing this “casual” language in the rest of the test, they are achieving a kind of “stream-of-consciousness” effect. But no one has time for that. And furthermore, the great practitioners of the stream-of-consciousness style—Faulkner, most notably—planned and agonized over their word choices, so that they now appear flippant and off-the-cuff.