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Fragging Without Shame

By Roy Peter Clark

I sit at this moment in my doctor's office staring at my cholesterol numbers, and they are not good. Too much pizza and Pepsi, I guess. I look up and notice two pieces of office art: a scale model of the human heart and the head of a giant alligator. The gator looks like he is about to eat the heart. It is not a comforting image for a guy whose cholesterol numbers are 70 points higher than his I.Q.

I avert my eyes, which now catch the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine. The headline reads:

Why the Pope Loves America

U.S. Catholics May Confound Him, but America Doesn't. On the Eve of His Papal Visit, a Look at How This Country Has Shaped Benedict XVI.

It occurs to me that the first and last of those sentences are fragments, which means that only the middle one can stand independently as a complete thought: "U.S. Catholics may confound him, but America doesn't."

Lots of meaning is packed into one complete sentence and two intentional fragments. The key word is intentional.

A college student once told me she liked to use fragments in her writing, but that her composition teacher corrected her every time. "Would you let me use fragments?" she asked. I told her I'd feel better about giving her permission if I knew that she understood the difference between an intentional and unintentional fragment, that is, between a strategy and a mistake.

A useful insight about language reveals that some words -- ones that would make a sentence complete -- are understood by the reader or listener, even if those words are missing from the text. If I should yell "Go to hell!" the subject is understood to be "you." But what if I said or wrote, "When hell freezes over!"? That clause has a subject and a verb, but cannot stand alone as a sentence. Yet its clarity and context keep it from being a mistake. The reader provides what is missing from information supplied earlier. "When hell freezes over!" can mean "I'll move to Florida when hell freezes over," or "I'll root for the Red Sox when hell freezes over."

So. The intentional fragment. Not a mistake. No siree. More than that: The intentional fragment can carry several important strategic uses in a piece of writing.

The Shotgun Blast

A fragment can explode upon the reader's sensibility to bring a shocking truth into sharp relief.  Consider this passage from Mark Haddon's novel "A Spot of Bother":

That fragment -- serving as word, sentence, and paragraph -- hits the reader like a shotgun blast.

The Rest Period

The fragment can offer relief, usually in the form of a resolution to a problem. Used as a single paragraph, the fragment offers a pause, especially when it follows a long sentence. Here Haddon describes a man waking from a nightmare:

He fixed his eyes on the tasseled lampshade above his head and waited for his heart to slow down, like a man pulled from a burning building, still not quite able to believe that he is safe.

Six o'clock.

He slid out of bed and went downstairs ...

The Inventory

A series of short fragments helps the writer build a body of evidence for the reader, especially in a form that reads less like a list and more like details from a narrative. Consider this paragraph from an essay by Wright Thompson on the rise and fall of baseball slugger Mark McGwire:

Only ghosts remain at McGwire's boyhood home in Claremont, California. Bits and pieces of a former life, things left behind. The pink and white chairs in the living room. The white wraparound couch. The blue wallpaper upstairs.

The Intensifier

My friend Jennifer 8. Lee, a former member of Poynter's National Advisory Board, uses few fragments in her entertaining book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles." When she does reach for one, it always intensifies the effect she is trying to achieve. In this passage, she describes the search for a certain Chinese restaurant in Omaha, Neb.:

I looked up the number online and dialed. A woman picked up.

I started out by introducing myself in Mandarin Chinese.

I received the telephone equivalent of a blank stare.

I switched to basic Cantonese.

More blankness.

I tried English.

The woman cut me off. "We're Korean," she said in a thick accent. Then she hung up.

Notice how that single fragment, "More blankness," helps Lee build the tension toward that delicious punch line.

Turn to the back cover and you'll discover that those trying to sell the book understand the intensifying power of the intentional fragment:

One woman.

One great mystery.

One consuming obsession.

Forty thousand restaurants.

Striving for Informality

You are unlikely to find many fragments in works of philosophy. That is because the fragment almost always expresses a degree of informality, except, perhaps, in works of poetry or oratory. But even in the most serious works of literature, the fragment is an irreplaceable building block of dialogue.

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Because of the sex?"

"Not just that."

"Then what?"

"Because of your mother."

I just made that up, but something tells me I've read a dozen scenes like it in novels or screenplays.

The Objective Correlative

T.S. Eliot argued that the poet is always in search of the object that correlated to a feeling or emotion the poet wants to express, hence the literary jargon: objective correlative. Watch how Jacqui Banaszynski uses the fragment to fulfill this purpose in an article she once wrote about Turkish refugees:

Toothpaste. And toothbrushes. Ten of them. One for himself, his wife and each of their eight children. Is that so much to ask? The man who calls himself Ali Ahmet wants to know.

"They are trivial things, but they are important," Ahmet says. "When I was in my home, I cleaned my teeth, and my children cleaned, at least three times a day. Since one month, since I left my home, we have not cleaned. And please, tell the world we have not enough soap."

A fragment is a rare way to begin a newspaper story, but in this case the power of that first word toothpaste serves as the physical manifestation of a man's search for dignity for his family.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on July 10, 2008 (boomark / email).

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