In an article on written representations of speech in a non-literary context, such as transcription by sociolinguists, Denis R. Preston argued that such spellings serve mainly to "denigrate the speaker so represented by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish, and so on".
Like Walpole, Dufresne suggests that dialect should be rendered by "rhythm of the prose, by the syntax, the diction, idioms and figures of speech, by the vocabulary indigenous to the locale".
[16] Some authors who use eye dialect include Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens,[17] William Faulkner, Greer Gilman, Alex Haley, Joel Chandler Harris, Russell Hoban, Terry Pratchett, James Whitcomb Riley, J. K. Rowling, Robert Ruark,[18] John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Paul Howard,[19] Finley Peter Dunne,[20] and Irvine Welsh.
[17] In his Discworld series of books, Terry Pratchett makes extensive use of eye dialect to extend the caricature of his characters, besides other visual devices such as changing the font used for certain dialogue.
[citation needed] In his 1937 poem "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel", John Betjeman deploys eye dialect on a handful of words for satirical effect; in this case the folly of the arresting police officers, who are made to seem like comic caricatures of themselves: Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew Where felons and criminals dwell: We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly For this is the Cadogan Hotel.
An extreme example of a poem written entirely in (visually barely decipherable) eye dialect is "YgUDuh" by E. E. Cummings, which, as several commentators have noted, makes sense only when read aloud.
[citation needed] Some cartoonists and comic book creators eschew phonetic eye dialects in favor of font changes or distinctive speech balloons.
Swamp Thing, for example, has traditionally been depicted using "crusty" yellow speech balloons and dialogue heavily laced with ellipses, suggesting a gravelly voice that only speaks with great effort.