Discussion Groups / English Usage / September 2007

I think you nailed it.

Hey, it's fiction.  There's no need to justify the author's style by
appeal to rules of grammar.  If it works, it works.  Contrariwise, if
it doesn't, it doesn't.

In this case the author's style seems not to work for you.  Have have
you abandoned the book yet?  If not, why not?

I would add that I have lost almost all patience with books whose
stylistic clunkiness obscures their substance.  I am in general
willing to give fiction a bit more stylistic leeway.  On very rare
occasions I have struggled through a poorly written book of nonfiction
on a topic of great interest to me, but I'm getting a bit old to make
the effort.

Executive summary: If you don't enjoy reading it, don't read it.

If you've been following the discussions here closely enough, you've
already discovered that almost every English usage issue is really a
matter of style. There is a great deal of cognitive dissonance
expressed here. Most of the well-educated posters who write well
disdain the idea of rules while using them. My guess is that that's
just another form of hypocrisy. The only reason anyone might have to
take their arguments seriously is that they write well enough to be
persuasive, and they do that by following rules they refuse to
acknowledge.

Still, much, if not all, of what is considered disputed usage really
is a matter of style. There are a few things that aren't, however.
This comma splice thing you raise is not a matter of style for me. I
find it just as annoying as you do.

It's perfectly reasonable for a novelist to write dialog that runs
sentences together to give the character who speaks it a particular
style. But, as His Honor says in his reply, it either works or it
doesn't. The sentences you offer above are not dialog but
description, it seems. Perhaps they are written from a character's
POV rather than from an omniscient narrator's, but that doesn't
matter, IMHO. They don't work for me. All I see is punctuational
idiocy and ignorance attempting to imitate art.

The first comma in both sentences needs to be a period. Or maybe just
eliminated altogether to give a breathless run-on quality that that
prissy comma cannot. The last comma in sentence two should be
something else -- maybe a dash, but not a comma for crissake. The
comma hollers out that the writer is a punctuational idiot, as most
of us are.