I question the unwritten assumption that this is a good thing.
Apparition in the Woods
Err...
That said, it's also kind of wrong. You can write truly naturalistic dialogue, but it will sound odd if you don't pace it properly in the context of the prose, which is all too easy to do. That doesn't make it impossible.
edited 2nd Jul '12 1:11:50 AM by JHM
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
Well, yeah. Real world dialogue is full of 'um's and 'ah's and 'So yeah's and 'like's. If you tried to perfectly reproduce it including all of those things everybody would sound confused or hesitant all the time.
Other stuff, like incorrect grammar, I usually try to reproduce, though.
Be not afraid...
Nemesis
Those tend to be the kind of thing we don't remember from real-world dialog — we filter them out. Thus, it's realistic to omit them from written dialog, because we're absorbing written dialog at a different mental level from conversational speech. It's appropriate to give it as we tend to perceive it.
A brighter future for a darker age.
@ Mr AHR
It's useful to do that but fictional dialogue is always going to be different from real world dialogue. However, I do agree that having a deeper understanding of real world dialogue lets you understand why fictional dialogue is different and in what ways.
@ Morven
Well, I suppose everything is going to be situational. If you're in a tech environment, you'll hear a lot of Indian, Chinese, Russian, French accents. If you're in a blue collar construction job, you'll hear a lot of Italian and Polish. Old Canadian accents sounded a lot more British than the very American-style Canadian accents of today.
But beyond that, I generally like to try to work on my dialogue ability in terms of trying to figure out what a character likes to talk about and how they think rather than accents and so on. In written media, I feel that comes off stronger.