I’ve been mulling (and cringing) of late over some of the dialogue I’ve been encountering in both my readerly and writerly travels.  There is most certainly some ongoing, insidious renaissance of sorts of old-fashioned dialogical pretension, or perhaps it’s merely a morbid authorial fear of abbreviations, or an unbridled desire to apprise the reader as to the novelly goings-on through a delightfully enlightening exchange.  Either way, there seem to be an awful lot of teenaged protagonists going about sounding horribly like Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, my dialogue is similarly as awful, so I’m doing my best to engage the delete key at frequent intervals (in fact, so much so that both the backspace and delete keys have almost smudged off my keyboard entirely).