Writing Tools

Now that the book version of Writing Tools is about to hit the streets, it might be fun to criticize my list of 50 strategies for what it leaves out.

The fragment. For example.

The sentence, we learn early, is a group of words -- with a subject and verb -- that expresses a complete thought. Yet there comes a time when we can unlearn that lesson because the intentional fragment can have a powerful effect on the reader.

Key word: intentional.

Consider this opening to a travel story I found in an airline magazine on a recent flight:

Bats, cockatoos and lizards in an aquarium? Have the waters receded at Baltimore's most famous Inner Harbor attraction? Hardly.

That complete sentence in the middle is framed by two intentional fragments, creating the light, clean, informal voice so characteristic of air lit.

Next to me on the plane, a nice lady was reading "The Pact," a novel by Jodi Picoult. She let me thumb through it in a search for fragments.  I came upon this dialogue:

"Well if they do, so what? They're going to have sex one day anyway."
"Yes," Melanie said slowly, "but it doesn't have to be at fifteen."
"Sixteen."
"Wrong. Chris is sixteen. Emily is fifteen."
"A mature fifteen."
"A female fifteen."

Mostly, we speak in fragments -- and Picoult's dialogue reflects that, creating the effect of eavesdropping on real speech.

That gives us strategic reasons to use fragments:

1.) To frame a question
2.) To lighten the prose.
3.) To create the illusion of speech.

And there are more:

4.) To change the pace, especially after a longer sentence or passage.
5.)  To nail home a truth: "Lies, all lies."

I've checked my opinions here against those of that great standard-bearer, H.W. Fowler.  In Modern English Usage, he offers practical advice on the use of what he calls the "Verbless Sentence." He admits that "a grammarian might say that a verbless sentence was a contradiction in terms." But, at least in this case, let the grammarians be damned:

The verbless sentence is a device for enlivening the written word by approximating it to the spoken. There is nothing new about it. Tacitus, for one, was much given to it. What is new is its vogue with English journalists and other writers, and it may be worth while to attempt some analysis of the purposes it is intended to serve.

Among those purposes, Fowler lists (with examples): a transition, an afterthought, a dramatic climax, a sharp comment, a picture, an aggressive opinion -- in general, the creation of a livelier, more staccato style.

Fowler is my hero:

Used sparingly and with discrimination, the device can no doubt be an effective medium of emphasis, intimacy and rhetoric. Overdone, as it is in the sprightlier sort of modern journalism [circa 1926?], it gets on the reader's nerves, offending against the principle of good writing immortalized in Flaubert's aphorism [I'm translating from the French, here]: "The author, in his work, ought to be like God in the universe: present in everything, visible in nothing."