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  Rule Number Two is to use multiple-hyphen adjectives sparingly and artfully—as if you needed to be told. But their seductiveness can lead even the forewarned to toss off facile Germanisms rather than dig for the right words. Certain types of subjects—among them looks, attitudes, postures, smiles, tones of voice, and schools of thought—inspire Germanisms so readily that to use one may risk cliché. Consider using a word like demure, for example, before spewing out, “She had that I’m-a-shy-girl-of-good-breeding-so- treat-me-with-gentle-respect look in her eyes.”

  For artful use, we suggest favoring Germanisms that achieve an effect—image, mimicry, euphony, rhythm, disjuncture, tension, tone—and discarding those that merely spell out some adjective’s meaning. One needn’t press for high-art usages; something like “a low-center-of-gravity guy,” as sportscaster John Madden described a girthy football lineman, is art enough.

  Rule Number Three is one of form: Insert a hyphen between all the words of a compound adjective when they act together on the thing modified. Crystal-ball-toting literati refers to literati toting crystal balls. But crystal ball-toting literati, as one magazine punctuated it, depicts literati made of crystal who are toting balls. Maybe the writer saw it that way.

  Rule Number Four also deals with form: Be sure to separate compound adjectives with commas when each compound acts independently on what is modified. For example, in the Germanism a muscle-twitching, wide-eyed specimen, the word specimen is modified in two independent stages; but in a gluteus-maximus-muscle-twitching specimen, all the adjectives work as a unit and are linked by hyphens.

  And a quick Rule Number Five for all you tightly muscled word-pushers: Do not use hyphens after -ly adverbs.

  But now we are entering a grammar-is-taking-all-the-fun-out-of-this-chapter area. You get the idea. Be inventive, but stop when you feel you’re hyper-hyphenating to the point of passing out.

  TWENTY

  A LICENSE. TO FRAGMENT. SENTENCES.

  You. Were warned. Against the sentence fragment. The clipped sentence. Way back in composition class. Sentence fragment. Sound familiar? A quasi-statement beginning with a capital, ending with closing punctuation. But lacking a verb. Or subject. Sometimes both. Like these would-be sentences. Which are mere fragments.

  Sentence fragments. Incorrect! Never to be used. Except for effect. And only by copywriters, journalists, and literary authors. Not you.

  Okay, hold it. Can we bring out the verbs and subjects for a minute? Where were we? Oh, yes: At one time you might have learned that stylish writers were allowed to use fragments, but not you; not you the lowly student. Fragments were not for you.

  Until now! Because now you are one of those stylish writers. Writer 007: You have a license to fragment. And from time to time, no matter what you are writing—hot news, features, fiction, drama, ad copy—you will fire off the occasional sentence fragment. You will do so because

  • fragments are a natural and common form of speech, whether in narration or dialogue;

  • they mimic thought snippets;

  • they dispense with obvious or repetitious verbiage, such as “there is”;

  • they provide refreshing variations of rhythm and tone within paragraphs; and

  • they help writers create special moods, from dreamy to manic.

  But you’ll want to mind these pitfalls:

  • overuse of fragments, rendering them monotonous, ludicrous, and ultimately unbearable;

  • worn-out uses—as for example, in hard-boiled narrative: That doll. A knockout. A killer. Especially with that gat. Aimed at my eyeballs.;

  • lazy uses, where complete sentences would deliver greater force or elegance (see sidebar, “Fragmenting the Great Whale,” below).

  LOW-MILEAGE FRAGMENTS

  Most fragments piggyback on the action of the sentences preceding them, adding some modifying detail or reinforcing imagery: The vacuum sucked the alien through the porthole. Tentacles first, egg sac last. Into the grip of space. Black. Airless. Lethal. But the ride can go only so far. Even with the drama provided by full-stop pauses, fragments soon run out of energy. The narrative flow needs a recharge; namely, the power of verbs driving subjects.

  Knowing this, most writers go easy on the fragments. Only for special effect do they launch a parade of them. Philip Roth, for example, uses a series of fragments in The Human Stain to sketch a woman’s thoughts as she tries to sort out her motivations:

  Ambition. Adventure. Glamour. The glamour of going to America. The superiority. The superiority of leaving. Left for the pleasure of one day coming home, having done it, of returning home triumphant.

  Poets, with their dispensation from the rules of crafting sentences, sometimes string fragments into whole verses or even poems. Maestros like Canadian poet Anne Carson can pull it off. Many beginners merely pile on single-image fragments until a point is forced: Her tin of single earrings. / Drawers of pills. / Threadbare wigs. / A girdle, decades old. But the pile-ups are essentially lists until sentences give them context and direction.

  Likewise among prose stylists: the fragments tend to be organized by full sentences. Joan Didion, everyone’s favorite representative of the clipped style, uses staccato fragments to underscore tense moods and to evoke the bursts and repetitions of interior monologue. Often in her work, a brief fragment constitutes a whole paragraph. But everything rises out of the mother sentences:

  There was no doubt we were dealing with forces that might or might not include predictable elements.

  Elements beyond our control.

  No doubt, no argument at all.

  And yet.

  Still.

  (—The Last Thing He Wanted) (italics hers)

  * * *

  FRAGMENTING THE GREAT WHALE

  Sound bites, instant messaging, coded vernaculars: Are we moving toward fragmented expression in general, toward a language of clipped sentences and key words? Compared with the prolix, serpentine styles of the nineteenth century, our prose does seem headed that way.

  Perhaps fragments put a hop in our writing, help it compete with today’s frenetic media. But if laziness were to draw us away from subject-verb constructions, with their rhythms and emphases, we would risk losing the narrative grace, eloquence, and clarity that has always engaged readers. Imagine if Herman Melville’s Moby Dick had begun as follows. How long before a reader would have jumped ship, whale or no whale?

  Ishmael the name. Years ago, little money in my purse. Or no money. Nothing to interest me on shore. Nothing particular. A thought: sail about a little. A view of the world. The watery part. No more spleen. Regulate the circulation. The symptoms? Grim about the mouth. November in my soul. Damp. Drizzly. High time for some sea. My pistol and ball. Same with all men. Almost all. Same feelings. Toward the ocean. Nearly.

  And now, swim among the refreshing verbs in Melville’s original opening lines:

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; . . . then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. . . . If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

  * * *

  OLD FRAGMENTS & NEW

  Today’s cell phone addicts, E-mailers, and text messagers embrace sentence fragments as if they’d invented them. And perhaps they—we—have done just that, reinventing a rhetorical device as a conversational code:

  Yo, word?

  Hey. Same old.

  Me 2.

  Kinda wired L8tly.

  Starbucks much?

  Yeah. Really.

  But surely we sapiens grunted fragments long
before we formed sentences, and we’ve probably never stopped. Had our fragmenting skills flagged, the telegraph would have revived them—DIVORCING YOU. STOP.—not to mention the clipped utterances of Jack Webb on TV’s Dragnet in the 1950s: “Just the truth, ma’am.” In literature, fragments appeared in the Bible and other venerable texts, eventually coming to serve an aesthetic purpose in such classics as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House:

  London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. . . . Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. . . . Fog everywhere.

  Dickens used these “crisp, tasty sentence fragments” to draw us into the story, observed Donald Newlove in his critical collection First Paragraphs. He noted that the fragments in Bleak House “fire us instantly,” before a buildup of long, complete sentences that suggest the novel’s atmosphere of literal fog and legal obfuscation.

  Fragments that paint a scene in small flashes, as in the Dickens passage, are perhaps the most common type in journalism and literature— second only to those used in dialogue. These scene-setters are like fragments in a stage direction, eliminating such verbiage as one sees or there appear and simply presenting the subject’s relevant elements: A cheap hotel room. Disheveled writer at window. Flashing neon sign outside. But there are scene-setters, and then there are scene-setters. See how beautifully Sandra Cisneros, a sentence artist, uses fragments to establish a scene in her novel Caramelo:

  Acapulco. In a house shaped like a boat. Everything curled like the fronds of a fern. The ocean. Our hair. Our sandals drying in the sun. The paint on the boat-shaped house.

  And she knows when to stop. Lesser writers produce exhaustive lists: A hotel room. Mini-bar. Liquor miniatures. Canned mixers. Packaged cheese. Salted nuts. Candy bars. Corn chips. Dips. OK, we get it—now shut the door!

  For high-pitched scenes, writers often call on fragments to suggest breathlessness and urgency. In bodice-rippers, when passions dare not speak their verbs, the prose tends to gasp in fragments:

  Her mouth. Welcoming. Eager.

  His shirt torn. The steely muscles.

  His longing.

  Together. Now and forever.

  Bliss unimagined.

  I can tell you from experience that hacks love the paragraphed fragment for the way it eats up space. But writers at all levels take advantage of the fragment’s energy. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, novelist Dave Eggers let it add a touch of the manic to his protagonist’s musings:

  But she looked like she had a boyfriend. Did she? That secure look. So at ease. Not just a boyfriend, but a good man, too. A large man maybe. A boyfriend who lifts heavy things for a living. Or could, if he wanted to.

  In The Life of Pi, novelist Yann Martel mixes fragments with short sentences when the hero finds his cargo ship breaking up in a storm:

  Inside the ship there were noises. Deep structural groans. I stumbled and fell. No harm done. I got up. . . . I had gone down just one level when I saw water. Lots of water. . . .

  Such fragments are natural and forceful. Their task is simply to advance the drama in small parcels. But problems can arise when fragments are overburdened; when they are asked not only to add some information, but to help us keep track of who, what, where, and how. Consider, for example, the following passages from two novels I enjoyed overall, but whose fragments I found wearing:

  Up in the burying ground under the starlight. Full of pie and boiled beef. A hard freeze coming down. The sky jellied with light. Little sips of whiskey. . . . Another sip of whiskey. Shaking his head. (—Jeffrey Lent, In the Fall)

  A barely there morning. A mean-thin trickle of water from the shower nozzle. A breakfast of cornflakes no choice and white bread, no choice and Vegemite, no choice and Bushell’s tea and instant coffee. . . . Dave talking loudly into the emptiness of how he wants to be a cool dad. (—Nikki Gemmel, Alice Springs)

  The punchy writing styles of today could hardly exist without fragments, which help create the conversational style. But writing is not conversation, which benefits from such nonverbal cues as voice quality, body language, and timing. Even digital conversation has its codes, emoticons, and other means of inflection. Conversation can proceed almost indefinitely using fragments propelled by cues. Writing cannot. To hold its readers, writing needs more of the clarity that comes from named things doing named acts: Sentences.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE POETRY OF LISTS

  Can you identify this list of particulars from a novel that shocked America in 1958?

  [F]our books of comics, a box of candy . . . two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with high white shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses . . . swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks.

  In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, these are among the items that Humbert Humbert buys to appease his preteen inamorata during their infamous road trip across the United States. In structure, this is simply a list; but like a Greek chorus, its particulars chant the pathos of Humbert’s warped adoration.

  Lists find their way into every type of writing: into poetry, as parades of images; into fiction, as revealing inventories; into journalism, as persuasive details. Mystery writers pan crime scenes for particulars, nature writers harvest whole landscapes, food writers empty the larder (as do many literati; see sidebar below, “Particulars on a Platter”).

  Young authors pump out lists with unstoppable gusto: the grungy contents of a room, a character’s gross body particulars. But too often the vitality of such lists dissipates in their insistent overkill. “Yes, yes—we get it,” readers find themselves thinking. But restraint is difficult. Writers fall in love with their collections of telling items. And, of course, the more items, the less meaning each has to deliver.

  But lists of particulars do indeed deliver—or can, when treated more like poetic elements than laundry lists tacked to the narrative. One of the holiest mantras of creative writing is, “favor the concrete over the abstract, the particular over the general.” Nothing beats the power of a concrete particular to stir associations and feelings. But many writers—their journals overflowing with painstakingly observed particulars—rush to unload them by the bushel. And so we get lists such as this one from the novel Hourglass by Danilo Kiš, enumerating the garbage along a jetty:

  [A] melon rind, a tomato, a half-eaten apple, bloated cigarette butts, a dead fish, crusts of bread, a dead rat, a box of matches, a squeezed half lemon, a rotted branch, a pinecone, a toothpick, a few wisps of straw, fish scales . . .

  And the author goes on and on, listing some twenty-three more items. The widely admired (but to me, unreadable) Kiš has been called “a master of lists,”—and indeed, he’s been known to spin them out as long as two hundred items. But only the tortured souls who inhabit his novels would counsel other writers to do the same.

  A long list is usually an indulgence. As stimulating as each individual item might be, the procession can become as tiresome as a Tournament of Roses parade. The problem may be more than one of overload. Something that so disrupts the narrative pace needs a purpose—other than showcasing the author’s collectibles. The particulars need to play off of one another, or build to a crescendo; they might serve to create an atmosphere or unveil layers of character, but something should give them special, collective force. Call it the art of the list—a way of composing the particulars you’ve so lovingly gathered.

  A LOUSE CRACKED IN TWO

  Reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, I came across a passage— itself featuring a list—that presents a self-contained principle for list making, a hint for sorting out which particulars are worth listing. In the novel, an itinerant teller of stories to Amazonian tribes explains what sustains him as he walks the lonely jungle trails:

  I start listening. And I learn. . . . Afte
r a while the earth feels free to speak. It’s the way it is in a trance, when everything and everyone speaks freely. The things you’d least expect speak. There they are: speaking. Bones, thorns. Pebbles, lianas. Little bushes and budding leaves. The scorpion. The line of ants. . . .The beetle, as well. The little stone you can hardly see. . . .Even the louse you crack in two with your fingernails has a story to tell.

  “The things you’d least expect speak.” There it is: an unveiling of the force that resides in the unexpected and painstakingly observed particular. In listing, we often reach for the most symbolic items, the ones that seem to shout loudest—the dirty socks, the gold-plated Cadillac. But sometimes the less a particular speaks in its everyday existence, the greater its voice when coaxed into dramatic context.

  In his novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen compiles a list of some twenty particulars to illustrate the divide between a daughter and her mother. The items have little to say on their own as they sit gathering dust in the mother’s basement. But how poignantly they speak when the hot-wired daughter, by throwing out “her mother’s crap,” attacks the parent’s hated frugality: