Alexander Finbow's Blog - Posts Tagged "pronunciation"
Writing rhymes
When Big Bears Invade is a book written in rhyme. The inspiration comes from the work of authors like Julia Donaldson and Lauren Child who write children's books that adults enjoy reading aloud.
The unexpected problem I ran into with WBBI is that I grew up in England and I have a typical RP accent. Now the main readership for WBBI is in Canada and I have discovered that my pronunciation of certain words is very different to how a typical Canadian reader would pronounce those words.
Nyco, the illustrator pointed this out to me when we were working together via facetime. I asked him to read the book aloud to me, compared it with my reading, and then asked a dozen other people with different accents to read it to me.
Fixing the rhymes led to a lot more rewriting than I expected, but I think the book is stronger for it. The only rhyme left that might lead to arguments over drinks is poutine. From my research, the correct Francophone pronunciation is 'pootin' but most anglophones pronounce it 'pooteen'. Hopefully it won't lead to too much conflict...
The unexpected problem I ran into with WBBI is that I grew up in England and I have a typical RP accent. Now the main readership for WBBI is in Canada and I have discovered that my pronunciation of certain words is very different to how a typical Canadian reader would pronounce those words.
Nyco, the illustrator pointed this out to me when we were working together via facetime. I asked him to read the book aloud to me, compared it with my reading, and then asked a dozen other people with different accents to read it to me.
Fixing the rhymes led to a lot more rewriting than I expected, but I think the book is stronger for it. The only rhyme left that might lead to arguments over drinks is poutine. From my research, the correct Francophone pronunciation is 'pootin' but most anglophones pronounce it 'pooteen'. Hopefully it won't lead to too much conflict...
