Punching a Sentence to Death

I have a pet peeve. This is a practice I have been noticing lately among certain writers. I call it punching a sentence to death. It involves writing something that should be a full sentence, but instead the writer has chosen to put a period after each word. You. Know. What. I. Am Talking. About! The intention is to give bold emphasis to each word.

I started noticing this in a novel I read about ten years ago. I thought it was a one off. It was not. I saw it in another novel, and then another. Each time I encounter this, I cringe. It seems overly dramatic and artificial. It is a gimmick. There are other ways to demonstrate emphasis. Without. Resorting. To. This. It is kind of like certain newspapers or tabloids that felt it necessary to put an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. If you need an exclamation mark at the end of each sentence, then the story is not as dramatic as you are trying to make it out.

I feel the same way about punching a sentence to death. If you want a character to say something powerfully, then say it powerfully. If the words are not doing it, then use better words. When I see it, it takes me out of the story, focusing on the form rather than the content. That is generally not something an author wants to happen to his/her readers.

This is just my opinion. Maybe most people are not bothered by a sentence that has been punched to death. Perhaps for the first person who used this, it was avant-garde, but with each use it becomes more normalized, more accepted. Sorry, but for me, I am always going to cringe.

Star Liner

Comments

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...

The Linear Nature of Time

Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back No you cannot Go back Star Liner

The Screaming Silence

As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog