Sentence fragments. Annoy some people. Found in Dickens, though. Bad writing? Or stylistic choice?

It’s both. My current assignment comes from a writer who breaks a lot of rules. And it’s clearly done on purpose. He writes present tense, which drives a lot of readers batty. And he writes almost completely in sentence fragments, especially when his story gets going.

“Wow, TS. It must take you an hour just to get through one page!”

Not really. The point of editing is to make sure the writer not only gets their point across but also doesn’t get in their own way. In other words, cutting out all the writing for the sake of writing. Mind you, I edit mostly fiction. Non-fiction requires a different set of rules, and let’s not get started on corporate editing, which means the Chicago Manual of Style is a polite suggestion when the company has a style manual to be treated like the Bible. (Which most translations probably violate. ‘Cuz, yanno, God never went through the mandatory employee orientation.) 

So occasionally, you get people who break rules on purpose. Is this bad writing? Well, it depends. Your ultimate audience is your reader. However, reviewers may or may not get to your work first. So guess what? The lady on the beach might think you’re just swell, but the reviewer will be leaving a two-star review because you insist on ending every sentence with a preposition. While I think that’s a fake rule, it is annoying when writers do that too often. They should check out the Elements of  Style from the library, assuming they know where the library’s at.

Where were we? Sentence fragments.

Much of what a writer puts down is dictated by rhythm and cadence. Most of us who write hear the words in our heads. That’s why that last sentence occasionally gets out in the wild as “Most of us who write here the words…” Sometimes, the brain just picks a spelling and runs with it. So, as in the case with my current author, you sometimes get long blocks of prose written in punchy, short phrases. And yet in context, it works. It might not get over the transom, but it works. (This one, by the way, did get over the transom, or it wouldn’t be on my desk.) Now, if this person wrote bestsellers, one of two things would happen: hundreds of acquisitions editors would be flooded with similarly written stories (most of which would be badly written) or publishers, smelling a buck, would insist their writers adopt the style (also resulting in a flood of bad imitations.)

Fragments are the more readable version of the run-on sentence. The difference is, writing in an age of declining attention spans, where it’s hard enough to get people to cue up a book on a Kindle, never mind a print book, run-ons are an abomination that should be weeded out. An argument could be made for chopping up that last sentence, though technically, it’s not a run-on.