"Time. He left his smock behind..." (p. 443)
At school, it was drilled into us that every sentence had to have a subject and a predicate and that the latter was usually a verb although it could be a preposition as in:
"Down with Big Brother";
"Up the Republic!"
"Up with him onto the donkey" ( a literal translation from Irish which, in the Republic, we also learned very badly).
With an imperative verb, e.g.:
"Go!"
- the subject is implicit: "(You) go!"
Thus, "Time..." would not have served as a sentence. But it does. It is a complete thought because it is an abbreviation for "It was time."
Grammatical rules had the force of moral laws! But an English teacher, when pressed, eventually conceded, "I am just telling you the rules. Afterwards, do what you want." I never conceived that my eventual chief pass-time would be not just reading but that combined with writing.
9 comments:
Speech (rendered as dialogue) is necessarily different from formal prose. If you're interested in doing it realistically, that is.
Right. Some people's conversation is incoherent if recorded and reproduced as text: nonverbal sounds; pauses; unnecessary repetitions; self-interruptions; uncompleted phrases and sentences; repetitions of redundant phrases like "and so on and so forth"; taking forever to get to the point and sometimes not getting there anyway; hand gestures and facial expressions included as inputs etc.
True. Prose -derives- from speech, ultimately, but it's a different animal. It's -purely- verbal, while conversation always contains a great deal of nonverbal communication.
For example, in cursive Romans ran all their words together and used few or no punctuation marks. That's a legacy of an oral culture -- you put in that sort of thing yourself, and nearly all reading was done aloud.
Kaor, to Both!
I first came across discussion of how confused and incoherent people can be about 50 years ago in one of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. One character criticized how many mysteries had witnesses making clear, concise statements when being questioned--when in real life it was so often not like that at all. Either Wimsey or his police officer friend Parker replied writers had to do it that way--to realistically depict how witnesses actually talked would make their stories too boring to read.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: not least because the -words- would lack the nonverbal element.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I would have thought confused, incoherent, muddled statements would be functionally non-verbal. Words confusedly strung together which were not satisfactorily conveying information.
Ad astra! Sean
Well, it depends. Unless they're actually incoherent, the words convey some information; non-verbal clues convey more.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Granted, a skilled questioner would know how to get eyewitnesses to convey what they knew reasonably and coherently.
Ad astra! Sean
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