I’ve noticed a tendency of modern writers to write clipped sentences and paragraphs.
Like this. One or a few in each paragraph, for certain scenes.
Not even action scenes.
Ones where there’s supposed to be descriptive of a scene, or internal thought development.
I can understand if it’s first person from a certain kind of character.
Or in blogging, because reading online is different.
But even that is getting out of hand.
Maybe it’s just me.
I’m not concerned with “online readability” posting techniques, building a social media platform, hosting blog tours, throwing contests at you every week, indecipherable industry acronyms, graphical links and bolded words everywhere, marketing myself to hell.
See, even in that paragraph I used too many commas.
I don’t like screaming at people that come to this blog.
But in printed fiction this style gets aggravating. It reads like those Dr. Seuss’s Board Books
Should I be blaming authors, readers, editors?
Functional, grown adults should not be writing like this for other adults.
5 Comments
Political speech. Watch the current president speak and some other elected officials. Many of them used fragmented thought and clipped speech. I can only think it gets folks attention when little attention is paid.
I’d recommend reading Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s about how certain forms of communication have biased content, i.e., the telegraph cannot convey certain types of information. The book is more about TV, and how it is inherently biased towards shallow information (as opposed to books).
The author mentions live presidential debates, when Lincoln was running (I think). People would go to these for hours, break for dinner, then come back to the debates until the early morning.
Many authors do this for rhythm, I think, to create a cadence. I can’t stand it, personally. Once in a while, sure–but if I get to the point where I question the author’s ability to write or think a complete sentence, then I’m done. Why should a reader have to read a series of frags to get the sense of what should have been one sentence?
It’s somewhat ironic that you are criticizing authors using truncated sentences, when you yourself are unwilling to even write out the entire word “fragments” …
Eh? Use shorthand slang in a blog comment is nowhere near the same thing as littering a book with one clause sentences.