Davaris opened this issue on Oct 25, 2007 · 4 posts
Davaris posted Thu, 25 October 2007 at 11:02 PM
Hello,
At the beginning of the year I started reading some of HP Lovecrafts works and now I am hooked! :)
Now I would really like to learn to write in the style of an educated person from the 18th or 19th century. So I was wondering does anyone know of any resources on the web or in print, that could help me learn to write like this?
mamabobbijo posted Thu, 01 November 2007 at 6:48 AM
Yet again the abscence of Dailyn is felt. She had more resources than a library! Perhaps you could start there, or start a web search.
Pedrith posted Thu, 01 November 2007 at 9:02 PM
There is a book entitled the Writers guide to the 1800, which gives an overview of the 1800, although it does not cover writing in the style. I suggest by starting to read other authors that have published during the 1800's and then try a go at it. You can never do to much research.
David
P.S. If it makes you feel better I'm working on a story set in 1764 Germany....research is my friend :)
Shoshanna posted Fri, 02 November 2007 at 4:08 AM
I'm not sure whether you are looking for a british or american speech pattern.
If it's american...
You may find the article at the link below interesting & the rest of the website is interesting if you are interested in the american civil war period. There is a section in the links area of the website about authentic speech.
http://www.authentic-campaigner.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1092
If you have access to JSTOR (perhaps through your library) there are a lot of articles about authentic speech patterns in the database.
If you are trying to find information on an upper class british accent, you need to search for what is known as RP (Received Pronunciation) which is what it's called by linguists.
If you google it you will come up with thousands of articles.
Hope that is of some help :-)