Competent Writing Skills (was Re: teacher rants)

[Vaska]

Hmm, don't know anything about the author of that sentence, but could be the
man [have a feeling it might be a guy] is on the decidedly youngish side of
any generational divide.  I remember producing some equally pretentious
stuff myself, in a slightly different vein, to be sure, and instead of
parsing it to death, the man who was my A'levels English tutor wryly
observed that perhaps I was becoming a little too Miltonic.  And what a
great way it was to get me to recognize my own [stylistic] folly without
denting that still tender writerly ego that had much to learn and needed the
license to commit all sorts of blunders before any axe would come crashing
down.   

No need for the preposition since lyrical prose makes all sorts of
allowances for pecisely such type of elision; the comma, however, is a
definite must.  As for just how unbreably precious the whole bit is depends
on the full context, on everything else the writer was doing before and
after the said sentence.  

Vaska

At 11:37 AM 7/14/97 -0400, you wrote:
>On Mon, 14 Jul 1997, S J Pate wrote:
>
>> I'm no english/writing teacher, but that is most definitely a complete
>> sentence, if a flowery one. I'm thinking the confusion arises from the use
>> of "summer afternoons when the tar bubbles bloom in the road" as an
>> adverbial phrase, after which there should be a comma, of course. The
>> comma, along with a nice preposition, would render the sentence much clearer:
>> 
>> "[On] Summer afternoons when the tar bubbles bloom in the road, wild
>> daisies beckon girls to seek petal fortunes and weave chains of fragrant
>> dreams." 
>> 
>> Still a pretty bad sentence.
>
>Is it really a complete sentence if you have to mentally supply the
>preposition "on"?
>
>If that's the case, then can we not, in light of the obvious poetic effect
>that the author is striving for, perhaps assume that "summer afternoons"
>is being apostrophized?  I.e., [O] summer afternoons, when the tar bubbles
>bloom....
>
>Nope...I'm still not convinced.
>
>Joe
>
>
>