*grumble grumble*

[hickumu]

*sigh*

How times change. Used to be I'd be the last person to pick on a book's poor grammar, even in the case of such atrocities like Twilight. Fragments were a favorite sentence usage of mine. Look back at my old fics and you can see plenty of instances where this is the case. I used to sigh in irritation whenever someone called themselves a "

Comments

[vyctori]

I spent quite a while looking at these, because I think there are some cases here where a comma is the less clear option, but still tolerable. But the more I looked, the more I came to the conclusion that your examples really would do better with different punctuation. So yeah.

Fragments aren't always bad, imo--as long as you don't overuse them. If you want to be perfectly correct in your grammar, it's fine to avoid them, but I'm perfectly okay with them when used sparingly. Which...doesn't seem to be the case here. (See? :P)

[hickumu]

That's the thing - if I hadn't been spending so much time reading "Reasoning with Vampires", where pretty much every grammatical issue hangs on repeated comma misuse, I think I could possibly overlook this. And part of the reason I could overlook it is because I would have much less of an idea about better or clearer alternatives. Dana, however, is actually quite good at going "okay, wouldn't it be better like this?" and so now I know to look for that and yeah.

Fragments are good if used sparingly; they can be great markers for emotional impact, especially from a first person perspective. Describing the cat is not emotionally impacting.

So yeah. I'm lame. Probably will still see the movie, though.

[bluestocking7]

It is an awesome book, but it suffered from a bad editor, in my opinion. Some of the fragments are, I think, stylistic and they can be forgiven.

[tiassa]

IAWTC. The Hunger Games books would have been a lot better with a better editor, but I chalked most of it up to a stylistic thing on the part of the author.

[hickumu]

One of my favorite books is actually an anthology "Sleeping Beauty Indeed, and Other Lesbian Fairy Tales". This is despite the fact that I cannot read the first two stories in it. One was just offensive, but the second - "Bones Like Black Sugar" - was literally incomprehensible due to its gratuitous use of metaphor and simile. That might have been a stylistic choice as well, but that didn't make it any easier to read.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but this isn't the first time this has been an issue for me.

[tiassa]

Well, no, it certainly isn't the first time I've had issues with that kind of thing either. I mean, as much as I'd like to read Perdido Street Station I can't get through China Miéville's love affair with the thesaurus, for example.

I managed to get through the Hunger Games books by turning off my inner editor until I was finished reading, but sometimes that just doesn't work.

[fleurlb]

Aww, see if you can stick with it - I loved that book enough to save it for my as-yet un-conceived daughter. I didn't find that much in the way of comma abuse, but then I went to Catholic school, where I learned the Old Skool comma rules. (which essentially boil down to 'use them early and often')

Have you read 'Divergent' by Veronica Roth?