But instead, with an abrupt change of pace, we get a new brief paragraph and a short penultimate sentence: That night he was fed his first solid meal. We are even prepared for more graphic and painful detail. That long first paragraph and all those richly worded sentences, filled with details of the injured soldier’s condition, have left us readers almost writhing in pain with him. That’s partly why the final sentence fragment-the single word “Snails”-is so effective. De Berniere’s style runs more toward longish, elegant, compound/complex sentences, like most of those in the first paragraph here. Everywhere.Ī consummate, almost classical stylist, de Bernieres has few fragments in his work (unlike Time magazine, which uses them a lot. This paragraph ends with three fragments that build on each other, until finally, shaken out of our period-ends-the-thought contentment by each new fragment, we realize that in a nanobot world (according to McKibben) people will be naked, powerless, and destitute. Then, as we think that that thought is finally over (because the thought in English sentences is supposed to be over at the period), we get more: the bots will eat all the cotton, too! Then another added fragment: and they’ll eat all the polyester or all the electrical stuff or even all the money. “Everywhere.” This first fragment is the first surprise: It’s not just the tires and roads in one area the nanobots will eat it’s the tires and roads all over the world. After the period at the end of the first sentence, we readers relax a bit, digesting a pretty frightening image: crumbling roads, cars with disintegrating tires. Here the reader thinks it’s bad enough that the insane nanobots (which were programmed just to clear up one pile of rubber tires) go crazy and start eating more nearby tires and even the roads. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. The old people and children came along slowly behind. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Meanwhile, I hope you find some of the advice on this blog useful. Much of what I say here has been said in other places-especially in fine books like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and Donald Hall's Writing Well. Given all this, I suppose I'm qualified to offer some suggestions about the subject of writing.
#INTENTIONAL FRAGMENT EXAMPLES FREE#
Feel free to use them in your own classes.) Now retired from full-time work, I still teach writing seminars, for free, to worthy nonprofits. (Note to teachers: Many of my blog posts originated as lesson plans.
#INTENTIONAL FRAGMENT EXAMPLES HOW TO#
Corporations like FedEx have hired me to teach their executives how to write better. I've taught writing at several universities-most recently Virginia Tech. I've been a senior editor at the New York Times Magazine Group, and I've published hundreds of magazine articles myself. Over the years, folks have paid me a lot of money for my writing and for my advice about writing. That means the ability to write is more than just an inborn talent it is also a skill that can be learned. Good writing is an art, yes, but it is also a craft, like quilting or carpentry or car repair. This blog will offer advice on style, grammar, even such mundane matters as punctuation.
After all, the surest sign of a good writer is an eagerness to become an even better writer. If you've come to this blog, you're probably already a competent writer-or well on your way to becoming one.
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