And fit your shortcuts to the genre and era and setting of your fictional world. Just be sure that your shortcuts make sense. That’s not saying you can’t use shortcuts, even single-word shortcuts. We don’t have to shortcut everything the way we do for social media. In novels and novellas, even in short stories, we’ve got time. If you’re writing long fiction, take the time to provide enough information for readers to understand, to take in meaning and emotion. There are too many possibilities for what these could say to leave the reader with only blank stare or cocked brow. What of cocked brow? Where’s the verb? Who’s doing the cocking? Does the phrase convey what it should?
What does blank stare mean here? Does Tilly offer one? Feel that she’s wearing one? Yeah, I’d show him where he could find himself. How could she clean the cages with the animals still in them?īut his shoes were tied, he was pulling on his coat, and his packed bags were sitting at the door. Tilly’s boss told her to clean the cages before she took the animals out for their walks. It’s hard to convey something such as that with a simple grin. Well, let’s just say that Betty didn’t grin unexpectedly any more. Grin? What does that mean? That Betty hid a grin? Couldn’t hold back a grin? That she wanted to grin? That Tilly was grinning? That a grin was threatening to break out but Betty couldn’t let it because the last time a grin escaped, her mother was so shocked she fell over backward-off the ladder she’d been perched on to take down Christmas decorations-and she’d tipped into the Christmas tree and of course that had listed toward the window, knocking out the newly installed glass and after that, with the hole in the glass, the cat had escaped, so Lady, the Pekinese with an attitude, had to jump out after her and . Not only are there places where fragments don’t work, there are some fragments that don’t work at all. For example, the shortcut style of instant messages and texts and tweets has crept into long fiction and sometimes just doesn’t fit. There are times when you need to spell it all out. There are times when the paragraph or scene is better served by full sentences, with specific verbs and subjects.
Use them, but do so with the knowledge that there are times and places where they work better than others. So, now that you know it’s okay, sometimes preferable, to use sentence fragments, how do you use them correctly? And those writers know how to write grammatically incomplete sentences that are nonetheless complete for their purpose. They can be necessary for the life of a passage.Īnd what readers know, writers know. Perhaps it’s just a first step from a first teacher, and somewhere down the line someone else was supposed to teach us how to break that rule in order to create phrases that make a splash when they’re grammatically incomplete but oh so thoroughly complete in meaning.įace it: readers of fiction know that sentences don’t need to be complete in order to make an impact. Or perhaps not. Creative non-fiction is filled with incomplete sentences.
Perhaps it’s the way to teach non-fiction. Well, perhaps that’s the way to teach language skills to children just learning how to write. But never use sentence fragments-never, never, never.Īre you nodding because that’s the advice you got? If you’re of a certain age, you were probably taught in school that incomplete sentences are a no-no.Īll sentences must have a subject and a verb and if they have supporting words, that’s even better. Maby Fiction Editor Beth Hill last modified March 11, 2012