How to Talk Like a Teen

I still remember a poster I saw as a teenager. It had been drawn by an adult, trying to appeal to teenagers. The poster proudly proclaimed how wizard the whole thing was. Wizard was a fine word for saying something was cool back in the day, but not the right word for teenagers of my generation*.

Then there were the posters that tried too hard to use casual language. Everything was full of "u r like going to like luv this, totally, like right". Though some people use 'like' as punctuation when they speak, that doesn't make it a good idea for a poster slogan.

All this was made even funnier by my teenaged vocabulary. I talk the same way I do today. You can imagine my reaction when an adult tried to 'talk teen' to me. I put it down to some sort of midlife crisis.

When I see books about teens written by adults, I do wonder when they go into stereotypical teen speech. Don't they remember what it was like to be a teen, and have fake teen-speak thrown at them?**

Most of the time, it's better to talk like yourself. Relating to someone is more about empathy for their viewpoints, than trying to copy the way they speak (and if you copy the stereotypes, you're just going to sound silly). That's not so handy if your writing a teenaged character of course, but even so, less is more. You can use modern slang without going over-the-top. It's also something to approach with a healthy dose of research. Some slang terms are specific to certain areas. Ones used at my school weren't used at every school in the area. The 'a teenager said it, so it must be modern slang' is another rocky road towards sounding very silly.

Still, it means every generation has something to laugh at during their teenaged years. I suppose that's fairly wizard, in its own way.

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* Things were usually bad when they were good when I was younger. Though I don't think a poster proclaiming how bad it was would have been an improvement. The potential for misunderstanding there is great.

** Natwest bank obviously does. As part of their series of comedy bank adverts, they ran one where bank managers tried to get down with the funky flow. This link cuts in a bit abruptly, but you can get the basic idea: Natwest Mashup.