Lagniappe...Hear first, write later

On writing style and speech, from Ben Yagoda's The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (2004):

Kurt Vonnegut once observed, "The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo speech you heard when a child...Lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as ornamental as a monkey wrench."

Thanks to that musical Brit writer, Rita Rud, for this quotation!