Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Misusing Adolescent Jargon in Middle-Grade Writing by Braden Bell


I’ve spent the last sixteen years working as a middle school teacher. Spending my days among middle grade adolescents provides wonderful opportunities for continuing research.

Since not everyone is lucky enough to be a middle school teacher, I thought I might use my monthly blog to pass on observations about today’s adolescents. I hope these thoughts can be of use to people who write about and for middle grade readers. I’ll add the obvious caveat that these are general principles based on my own experience. I’m sure exceptions exist.

I’m going to start with something that has become a pet peeve of mine: misuse of teen jargon (and I will use that term for any language unique to teens—slang, abbreviations, etc.).

I imagine we’ve all read books where the author tried to create an authentic middle grade voice by cramming contemporary jargon/slang/current teen lingo into a character’s mouth. It didn’t work. In fact, I think it sounds less authentic than having characters use no jargon at all.

Jargon is tricky. Kids do use it and authors want characters to sound authentic. But vernacular changes quickly, as do the cultural phenomena that inform the behavior and lived experience of young teens.

A term that is current when a book goes to the editor may be old news by the time the book is actually published. Unless you are writing historical fiction, this is probably something to avoid.

I know that sounds like common sense. I know this all sounds obvious. But based on more than a few things I’ve read, I think it’s a huge blind spot many authors have. I’ve certainly fallen into the trap and was saved only by a student reading my manuscript.

I don’t think it’s just me. I think all adults do this. When I accompany students to service projects or field trips, we interact with adults who don’t spend much time with kids. They almost always try to drop in some kind of cultural reference or slang term to be fun or cool. But it doesn’t work. It never works. However, I’m convinced most adults don’t realize just how off they are.

Here’s a suggestion: if a particular term was used in your youth, it’s probably hopelessly outdated now (same with musical groups or movies). In fact, if the last time you heard it on actual teen lips was more than a year ago, I’d be wary.  Go somewhere teens hang out and listen carefully.

Personally, I feel it’s better to not use jargon at all than it is to use outdated jargon.

This leads me to my next point, which is more subtle but possibly more important. Most kids I know don’t use jargon all that much in everyday conversation. I rarely hear them say anything like, “Okay, give me the 411/deets,” or whatever other term adults think teens use. I think you’re far more likely to hear, “No way! I wanna hear everything!” 

Off the top of my head, I think they are most likely to use jargon as adjectives, for example, "That guy is so jacked!" My sense is that they use nouns and verbs less frequently.

When they do use jargon, most teens don’t use it incessantly. For example, I have heard many students use “epic,” “legit,” and even “dude.” I have not heard them use it in every sentence.

(As an aside, let me add that this is true for many specific demographic groups, not just teens. I live in a rural county in the South. The people I know sound almost nothing like the clichés I often read or see in movies. For example, and this may be shocking, I have never been called “Sugar.” Not even by middle-aged waitresses at diners. But I digress.)

The main thing to remembers is that adolescents do use lingo sometimes, but in everyday settings, it’s generally the lesser part of their vocabulary. As authors, we might think of it as pepper: a useful ingredient to be employed with caution.

The adolescents I hear are more likely to use regular English, but in informal, even sloppy ways. For example, “gotta” instead of “got to.” They often use the shortest word that will work, have simple syntax, and speak with a different cadence, inflection and tempo than adults.

Going to places where teens congregate and listening can be illuminating. Girls and boys talk differently, and they talk differently in single-sex groups than they do in mixed groups. They talk differently with each other than they do when adults are around. On and on. It is far richer and much more complex than throwing a few current-sounding terms in. 

Jargon provides rich and tempting opportunities for authorial mistakes. I asked some students to read an early draft of my book, The Kindling. Among other things, I asked them to critique the voice and dialogue of the characters and tell me if they sounded like real teenagers. I was intrigued that the times they felt the voices were most authentic was when the characters used no teen jargon. The times they felt the voices were least realistic were when I employed jargon.

Looking back, I realize that this was because I had inadvertently descended into caricature. The jargon, while currently in use, was disproportionate and excessive. It turned my characters into clichés and was too obvious, obscuring more nuanced bits of characterization. Luckily, my students caught it.

There's an element of common sense here. If you don't speak French, be very cautious with having your characters speak French. Do a little research and at least have a native speaker look over your work. 

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that characters ought to seem like dimensional human beings. Jargon, like other external elements, ought to be a finishing touch, not the main component.

Note: The one exception to all I’ve said is that when they text or interact on social media, many teens do use a lot of abbreviations and lingo. However, I think that’s more about ease and convenience than it is reflective of their real mode of speech. 

Thanks for stopping by today! I'll let you all get back to your NaNo goals.


36 comments:

  1. Great advice, Braden. You're the bomb! (As my JH students would say...)

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    1. Thank you, Juli. And you rock :) What do you teach?

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  2. I teach fifth grade, and your observations and recommendations are spot on!

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    1. Thank you! 5th grade teachers are heroes. Do you teach all subjects or is it more specialized in your school?

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    2. Braden, I have taught all subjects at one point or another, but for the last few years I've specialized in English Language Arts (Reading & Writing) and Social Studies (History).

      And I'd rather teach 5th grade than middle school! Not quite as many hormones running amok.

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  3. Great post! The only thing I would add (and this is really a permutation of your authenticity point) is not to make the mistake of thinking all kids talk the same, either. There's no "one teen voice" or "one MG voice" - some will talk like they're mini-professors. Some will sound like a junior Joey on Friends. Assuming their people first (shocker!) will usually keep this from being a problem.

    Again - great post!

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    1. "they're" not "their" - ugh. I need caffeine.

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    2. That is an excellent point, Susan. Their voices should be natural, organic outgrowths of who they are.

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  4. I can see that with my kids and their friends. They are just people, like you and me, not some foreign alien species that talk in a different language. They definitely refer to subjects that I have no clue what they're talking about but that's not slang it's usually a reference to youtube videos or something kids are spreading around as funny.

    Terrific post!

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    1. That is a really excellent observation, Laura. The difference will often be less in how they say something and more in what they are talking about.

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  5. This is why I set my YA novels in the 90s, so I can be sure the slang fits the period! I'm kidding, of course, but this is a great post. I think as writers we have to remember that with certain things, like vernacular, less is often more. Authenticity does not always directly correlate to readability, in other words.

    Welcome to PMGM, Braden!

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    1. Thank you for your welcome, Matthew! Your comment made me think of a tweet by an agent I saw a few years ago. She said that every character she was seeing was into vintage music and she thought it was because the authors were simply being lazy and making their characters like things they were already comfortable with. And I think you are spot-on with "less is more." As much as I think I know that, every time I revise, I realize I don't know it as well as I should.

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    2. We all have this problem, I'm sure. I know I do, so thank goodness for revision!

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  6. This is great advice. I have three teen boys in my home, so I hear this first hand. Yes, this is some jargon, but they also speak like mini adults sometimes. Depends on the situation.

    I also think this applies to using current technology in stories. Like, what if we'd used My Space in stories a few years ago? Totally outdated now. I've read books that created their own type of "Facebook" without using Facebook, so that it wouldn't matter if Facebook faded away. (the horror!)

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    1. Thanks, Julie. I'm laughing at your example of MySpace! That is a very good point. All of this stuff really needs to be used cautiously!

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  7. This is great advice, Braden. I agree, totally.

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    1. Thank you, Cindy! I appreciate you stopping by.

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  9. eden unger bowditch6/11/13

    This is great, Braden. We can always tell when someone from abroad tries to use our local language. It just doesn't sound right. My son discovered that, upon returning to the US, kids from different places around ALL have different expressions that need defining. "I smell you, dude' for example. As writers, using the wrong jargon breaks the spell of the work. It takes readers out of the story and makes them critical of everything else. Perhaps we can pick specific for a character, but universal jargon comes and goes. M.T.Anderson in his brilliant sci-fi book 'Feed' has kids in the future calling each other 'unit' ('Hey, unit, what's up?') and creates his own jargon. As a writer of historic fiction,I can testify that finding the right jargon for the right time is SO important. I used 'the bee's knees' and had to remove it because, upon researching it, I discovered it was from the 1920s and my books take place in 1903-1904! It comes down to knowing what you're doing. Advice from Braden makes it clear that he does. THANKS!

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    1. I love "the bee's knees." Use it all the time. Didn't realize I was actually from the 1920s--probably explains a good many things about me. Now, how do I get home?

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    2. You crazy cat! You certainly aren't square.

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    3. Eden, I somehow missed your comment. So sorry! I love what you said about how jargon can be used to create not only character, but also evoke time and place. I can only imagine what your son thought the first time someone said, 'I smell you, dude.'

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  10. This is a great post, Braden. I echo Laura Pauling, in that sometimes I have no idea what my sons are referring to. But Youtube does figure very large in their conversations!

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    1. Ah yes, YouTube. And Vine. I'm hearing that a lot these days.

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    2. Vine?! I now have to do research about this one (research = asking my kids!)

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    3. Mine also talk about snap chat, which sounds very dangerous to me (it passes itself off as high privacy, and very temporary, but nothing is temporary that is sent via the internet).

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    4. Snapchat is bad stuff! It does exactly what you say, Matthew, providing a false sense of security and anonymity. Very dangerous. I've heard some real horror stories.

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  11. Good points. I remember overhearing some YA authors having similar thoughts: they landed on the reality that there were a few terms that were sort of timeless - "cool", for example, but as for the rest it's quite tricky to do without dating the book.

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    1. It's nice to know there are a few classic terms, aren't there. The linguistic equivalent of blue jeans, I guess.

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  12. When I was a teen (Which being halfway to 30 wasn't Forever and a day ago for me, as I post this in 2013) I didn't use much jargon either. That said, there was and is the occasional "Whatever", and I did go through a "Like" phase from 13 until 25ish...

    Even though I swore when I was ten not to be "that teen" who used "Like" the way people now use "Google" as a verb, I did, but thankfully it didn't last, and it never infected my writing, because even at 18, I was writing middle grade fiction, or in some cases middle grade disguised as YA, or vice versa...

    I actually have the opposite problem. I avoid slang because of the dated thing, but I more often get the "You're too formal and stiff" type of feedback regarding dialogue. Never mind the fact that few of my characters are teens, which reinforces that this can be a problem long before tween and teendom.

    It is hard for me to be informal in real life, never mind my writing, and I'm still working on it. That said, I like "Groovy" and "Happening" or "Hip" and I'm as far from a "Hippie" you can get.

    I was born in the late 80s, and most of the slang then was so aggressive and jerky, even at 16 I'd feel some dirty gangbanger just to SAY it, and I was not a gangbanger, or dirty, at least in the pervy sense (I'll stop there before a certain rap song I HATE comes into my head...)

    Seriously though, that said, will someone please explain where "Sqaure" came from? I never got that one...

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    1. SIDENOTE: I was born in the 80s, but my early childhood was in the 90s, but I was a "Retro Guy" in my family, and watched many films and television shows from the 70s and 80s as a kid and in my teens, but not realizing it at first. I still am a bit a retro nut, but there are shows from "My Generation" I loved, too, but I'm not a snob of what pre-dates me, which is apparently not the case now, but I can only speak for myself here.

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    2. Taurean, wikipedia has some theories about "Square:"

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_(slang)

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    3. That was one of the most enjoyable comments I've ever read, Taurean! I was sort of born at the mental age of 40, so I was much like you in several ways. Around adults, I tend to be fairly formal. For some reason, I have an easier time being informal around my middle school students.

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    4. Glad my rambling on this subject was enjoyable for you, Braden. Sometimes I worry I get too chatty about things. I meant to only say a few words, but than an epic monologue comes out instead! (The use of "Epic" was intentional, and the only time here I'll use it...LOL)

      Like some said in earlier comments, I tend to make up my own slang to avoid the "dated" issue, but use it sparingly, the only trick when making up your own slang is making sure the reader "Gets it" in context of the story's world without doing a collegial thesis breakdown which aside from slowing down the story, which would get annoying to the reader.

      I'm glad there are other writers who know the frustration of balancing formal and informal speech, both in their books and in life, there are some authors I love who are so electric and really engage their audience.

      I'm not there yet, but it's what I'm working toward. I know most authors practice at it and are no less nervous than I would be to give a live in-person presentation, but I do believe some learn quicker than others in some areas, and I'd be on the slow end of the learning curve. But I'll get better. I'm starting to better navigate social media, and even finding it fun, but still having a hard time creating a more unified experience between my blogging and social media.

      But compared to writing query letters, this is nowhere near as trauma-inducing.

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  13. Great post, Braden. This is so important. I think any kids writer's greatest fear is sounding like a tool when their trying to sound like a kid!! :)

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  14. Nice. That's exactly how I feel. Less is more. Dialog is more about how people view the world and interact with it than the specific phrases they say. It kills me when I read something that's dated by terms/technologies/phrases that are antiquated.

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Thanks for adding to the mayhem!