Competent Writing Skills (was Re: teacher rants)

[Paul Mackin]

>> "Summer afternoons when the tar bubbles bloom in the road wild daisies
>> beckon girls to seek petal fortunes and weave chains of fragrant dreams."




I concur with David a hundred percent (if I haven't already
said it).

			P.


David Casseres wrote:

The word "On"
> is elided from the beginning of the sentence, as in the great Walt
> Kelly's sentence "Some days I'm just too lazy to call a spade a spade."
> Leaving something like that to be "understood" is pretty common practice.
>  A comma after "road" would make the sentence easier to read, but a
> writer may well and legitimately choose to leave out such a comma for
> reasons of effect.  In this sentence it gives a certain wantonness,
> appropriate to the topic, and (more important) it strengthens the
> juxtaposition of those tar bubbles blooming against the daises.  I like
> it.
> 
> By the way, "good teeth boys" would be clearer if written "good-teeth
> boys," boys with good teeth.  Just a slightly twisted idiom.
> 
> Context is all.  I don't know what the rest of the column was like, but
> if I found constructions like those in the work of (dare I say it?)
> Pynchon, I wouldn't blink.  If it was a piece of technical description,
> I'd whip out the blue pencil toot sweet.