black winged fighter said:
Pirates say 'Arrrr"
But what if I want a girl to say:
“Let me go! Let me -- argh! Put me down!”
I want to show a scream in dialogue, in other words.
Pirates say both "Arrr" and "Argh." But pirates aside, "argh" is a pretty common expression, and it just doesn't sound like a scream. If you want to use a word to portray a sound, it needs to be onomatopoeic, such as "bang," "buzz," "click," "crackle," etc. "Argh" just doesn't sound like a scream.
I'm not at all sure there is an onomatopoeic word for scream. Sounds are the one place where it's usually better to tell than to show, especially when there is no onomatopoeic word to use. "She screamed" or "She yelped" is usually much better than trying to portray the actual sound. If you write "she screamed" or "she yelped," the reader will fill in the sound for you, and will do so in a way that sounds right to his or her ear.
But if you do want to portray the sound in text, you have to make whatever letters/words you use sound like a scream or a yelp. Listen to a scream. It sounds much more like AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE than like "argh."
Just for my own personal taste, the only times I've ever tried something like this was when I was going for blatant humor. Once upon a time I wrote a short story called "The Parachute." In it, there's a scene where the protagonist and a friend are on top of a silo with an old parachute. Thre's no bag for the parachute, and they use it by simply tossing the canopy into the wind. So far, they've only used the parachute on the ground, letting it drag them across an open field. Then they get the bright idea of trying to jump off the silo with it. Once up there, they chicken out, but accidently get swept off the silo when a gust of wind opens the canopy. They fall to the ground, one with the parachut tied around his shoulders, and the other wrapped around him for dear life.
In my version, I wrote.
"The parachute was barely barely large enough to support a skinny kid like me, and Eddie was not skinny. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, and the parachute did not even attempt to slow us down. I still remember what I said on the trip to the ground. All two seconds of it. I said, "AAAAIIIIIEEEE!" A feeling Eddie echoed."
Now, an editor at a top magazine bought this story, and guess what the only change he made was? In the published version, this paragraph read:
"The parachute was barely large enough to support a skinny kid like me, and Eddie was not skinny. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, and the parachute did not even attempt to slow us down. We both yelled. Actually, we both screamed all the way to the ground. Maybe two seconds, all told."
Now, this story has been reprinted several times, and for the first couple of reprints, I tried to slip my version of the paragraph back in. No joy. Each time the editor made a change. With time and experience, I now agree with them completely.
Unless there is a solid onomatopoeic word to use, trying to portray sounds very seldom comes off well. Even if your ear gets the sound right, it's highly likely a reader's ear may well disagree completely.
