Robert Penn Warren concludes the second paragraph of his essay "Why Do We Read Fiction?" (Saturday Evening Post, October 20, 1962) with this non-sentence:
First, as Robert Penn Warren, he can get away with it. A poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist, he can take literary license to drive home a point or surprise the reader by altering grammatical conventions.
Second, the fragment follows the previous sentence nicely:
Third, Warren trusts that his readers want as much plain speak as they can get in a deeply theoretical article. And what are fragments but plain speech? Got it?
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
To put it bluntly: no conflict, no story.Why would a renowned writer and educator write a sentence fragment and break two other standard English grammar rules, flawed though they are (beginning a sentence with a verb and using a colon after a phrase)? I can think of at least three reasons.
First, as Robert Penn Warren, he can get away with it. A poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist, he can take literary license to drive home a point or surprise the reader by altering grammatical conventions.
Second, the fragment follows the previous sentence nicely:
And the experience that is characteristically presented in a story is that of facing a problem, a conflict.Notice, again, Warren's contempt for four other standards: (1) don't begin a sentence with and: (2) avoid passive voice, as in is presented; (3) avoid awkward constructions, such as is that of; and (4) don't drop clarifying words, such as in which is before a conflict.
Third, Warren trusts that his readers want as much plain speak as they can get in a deeply theoretical article. And what are fragments but plain speech? Got it?
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
- Part 1: James Baldwin on Artists
- Part 2: Stanley Karnow on the Vietnam Memorial
- Part 3: Steven Pinker on Human Progress
- Part 4: Martin Luther King Jr. on Injustice
- Part 5: Andrew Sullivan on Religious Fundamentalism
- Part 6: Carl Sagan on the Environment
- Part 7: Harold Bloom on Shakespeare
- Part 8: Richard Bradley on Openers
- Part 9: T. S. Eliot on Dante
- Part 10: Edward Albee on Carson McCullers
- Part 11: John Donne on Immortality
- Part 12: William Styron on Robert Penn Warren
- Part 13: Robert Hass on Rainer Maria Rilke
- Part 14:Lewis Thomas on Social Animals
- Part 15: Dana Gioia on the State of Poetry
- Part 16: Robert M. Pirsig on Experience
- Part 17: Barack Obama on National Security
- Part 18: John Dewey on International Cooperation
