Competent Writing Skills (was Re: teacher rants)
Joe Varo
vjvaro at erie.net
Sat Jul 12 20:45:12 CDT 1997
At 05:58 PM 7/12/97 -0700, Paul Mackin wrote:
>Joe Varo wrote:
>
>>
>> "Summer afternoons when the tar bubbles bloom in the road wild daisies
>> beckon girls to seek petal fortunes and weave chains of fragrant dreams."
>>
>> This isn't even a complete sentence, ferchrissakes. It also needs a couple
>> of commas.
>
>And I reply: It seems COMPLETE to me. Subject and predicate. 'Wild
>daisies beckon' is all completeness requires.
Are you sure about that, Paul? How does "summer afternoons" function in
this sentence? Doesn't it need a predicate or a preposition? Had the
author written "On summer afternoons...", then we'd be okay, otherwise,
when I get to the end of the sentence (fragment) I'm waiting to find out
what the "summer afternoons" are doing.
>Commas around the dependent clause would be optional, but could detract
from >the elegance of the sentence. Or pseudo-elegance.
I dunno. The comma before "when" *might* be optional, but I think that it
is essential after "road". It just doesn't scan properly without at least
that comma.
It's "pseudo-elegance" at best.
>But my real quibble is, what's so sacrosanct about complete sentences?
>[...]
In this instance, I think it's pretty important. Sure, you can play around
and get improvisational sometimes, but in this particular "sentence" I
think that it shows a poor grasp of the language.
>Fussily (or just silly),
>
> P.
Even more fussily,
Joe
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