American Literature / Unit 11 AML 1043 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading Dialect Without Mocking It
The idea
Dialect passages are common on the exam and are answered by three habits. First, read the passage aloud in your head, since dialect spelling represents sound and resolves quickly when heard rather than parsed. Second, ask who is speaking dialect and who is not, because the contrast is usually the point: a frame narrator in standard English introducing a speaker in dialect sets up a judgment, and the question is often which of the two the story actually trusts. Third, check what the dialect speaker knows, since in Twain, Chesnutt and the regionalists the vernacular speaker is repeatedly the one who understands the situation while the educated frame narrator does not. Answer from what the passage shows about competence, not from what the spelling implies about education.
In practice
Hear it, place it, and ask who is right.
Where people slip
The exam builds distractors that treat dialect as a marker of ignorance. In this period's best writing the opposite is usually true, and the frame narrator is the one being taught.
Your place on the trail
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