Suu wat wuld Gothitelle sound liek iff LOLcat dozzn't fit?
I did have an ideah were she wuz species-confused.
Normally, I don't comment on how a writer handles language in their non-fic posts because I realize that not everyone spell-checks or proofreads everything they put on a forum (I certainly don't, for example), but please consider not writing like this. I had to crawl through the first line to figure out what it said, and even then, I'm still rather baffled as to how you managed to get "suu" out of "so" (or why "wuld" -- which in my head rhymes with "mulled" -- is a stand-in for "would"). :| To put it bluntly, it's not really cute so much as inconvenient for the rest of us. This is the kind of thing Astinus was trying to say (in kinder words): that having to make heads or tails of what a person is saying isn't going to help us that much. Also, the more obvious it is that you're going out of your want to spell correctly because you're emulating LOLcats or what-have-you, the more it sends the wrong message about your writing in general. I really wouldn't mind if you're writing quickly and just didn't want to hit the shift key to capitalize or whatnot, but you're probably putting effort into translating normal words into LOLcat (like doesn't into "dozzn't"), which tells me I probably shouldn't take your fic seriously. (So in answer to your original question, yes, it's true that people won't take someone who speaks in LOLcat seriously. It's because the speech itself isn't serious, and outside of cat-related macros, it can get pretty... difficult.)
Not to offend. Just saying. I've seen you do it on a number of other posts, so I just wanted to give you a heads-up there.
That being said, to answer your question, normal speech dependent on what your character is like. There's a couple of ways you can handle this:
1. It's okay to mention that a character speaks a certain way but have their dialogue written completely normally. For an egotistical example, a number of characters in the fic in my sig actually have accents. The main character and his father both speak with accents. The main? Queen's English, or a stereotypical English accent which causes him to have trouble pronouncing H-sounds at the beginning of words and R-sounds after vowels, among other quirks. (E.g., this turns the sentence "who's there" into "oo's theah.") His father? A Scottish brogue, which means he probably sounds a lot more like
this. Both are only mentioned briefly (and for the main, it's not even brought up until way after his appearance) because, first off, that would be annoying as
sin to do all the time for both myself and my readers and, second, it's not really all that necessary. It's generally understood that both speak differently than most of the other characters (who speak with generic "American" accents), and it's more about
what they're saying than
how they're saying it. Their characterization simply gets across better if I rely on getting their points made.
In short, this method is usually the better bet because it allows you to focus less on a "gimmick" and more on conveying characterization just by letting them act. Sure, working in a verbal quirk can say something about who a character is, but overdoing it can distract a reader from that character's actual message. Meanwhile, there's no such thing as
not doing it enough.
2. If you absolutely need to give a character a verbal quirk (like how Terry Pratchett's Death SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS to indicate an ethereal voice or like how a stereotypical four-year-old might not pronounce her R's correctly), do it sparingly and in a way that allows the reader to focus on the message more than how something is being said. Moreover, do it in a way that makes sense for that character. No one speaks the way LOLcats are written. No one. LOLcats are intentionally over-the-top, and they misspell things because it's meant to look like the cat
wrote them. (As in, no one says "rite." It's pronounced that way, but there's no reason why it would be that instead of "right" if a character's speaking it. The only reason why it's "rite" on a LOLcat image is because LOLcat captions go out of their way to misspell everything.) So, try to think about how people actually speak. Watch YouTube videos and try to write down what each word sounds like if it's spoken in a certain accent. Then, figure out the best times to take those and use them in text so as not to force the reader to spend a good portion of their time trying to figure out what everyone is saying.
Also, figure out the character's personality as well. As I've mentioned earlier, sometimes, you might have a character with a personality quirk that causes them to speak a certain way (like a character who speaks only in sentence fragments, a character who stutters and repeats themselves, that sort of thing). This still isn't a good reason to use LOLcat, of course; it just means that if that character's personality or mentality causes them to speak a certain way that can't be covered with something like "she spoke childishly" or "she spoke with a
____ accent," then that's the kind of thing that would just always appear in dialogue.
In short, best way to treat characters' speech is either by figuring out how people actually speak or just mentioning that they have an accent off-hand.
