In Defense of Fragments

In Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1837), rascally Alfred Jingle tells a macabre tale that today would probably be labeled an urban legend. Jingle relates the anecdote in a curiously fragmented fashion:

"Heads, heads--take care of your heads!" cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. "Terrible place--dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!"

Jingle's narrative style calls to mind the famous opening of Bleak House (1853), in which Dickens devotes three paragraphs to a choppy description of a London fog ("fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin") before introducing his first complete sentence.

In "Diligence" (one of the sketches in "Suite Americaine," published in 1921), H. L. Mencken employed fragments of a different kind to evoke what he saw as the bleakness of early-twentieth-century America:

Pale druggists in remote towns of the Epworth League and flannel nightgown belts, endlessly wrapping up bottles of Peruna. . . . Women hidden away in the damp kitchens of unpainted houses along the railroad tracks, frying tough beefsteaks. . . . Lime and cement dealers being initiated into the Knights of Pythias, the Red Men or the Woodmen of the World. . . . Watchmen at lonely railroad crossings in Iowa, hoping that they'll be able to get off to hear the United Brethren evangelist preach. . . . Ticket-sellers in the subway, breathing sweat in its gaseous form. . . . Farmers plowing sterile fields behind sad meditative horses, both suffering from the bites of insects. . . . Grocery-clerks trying to make assignations with soapy servant girls. . . . Women confined for the ninth or tenth time, wondering helplessly what it is all about. . . . Methodist preachers retired after forty years of service in the trenches of God, upon pensions of $600 a year.

And in the opening paragraph of his essay "The Girl of the Year" (1964), Tom Wolfe unleashed this unpunctuated series of fragmented images to describe the "flaming little buds . . . inside the Academy of Music Theater":

Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerina Knight slippers . . ..

Different as these passages are, they illustrate a common point: fragments aren't inherently evil. Though an obsessively prescriptive grammarian might insist that all fragments are demons waiting to be exorcised, professional writers have looked more kindly on these ragged bits and pieces of prose. On occasion, they have found some imaginative ways to use fragments effectively.

Almost 30 years ago, in the text An Alternate Style: Options in Composition (long out of print), Winston Weathers made a strong case for going beyond strict definitions of correctness when teaching style. Students should be exposed to a wide range of styles, he argued, including the "variegated, discontinuous, fragmented" forms used to great effect by Dickens, Mencken, Wolfe, and countless other writers.

Perhaps because "fragment" is so commonly equated with "error," Weathers reintroduced the term crot, an archaic word for "bit," to characterize this deliberately choppy style. An increasingly common style. The language of lists, advertising, blogs, text messages. Like any device, it can be overworked. And inappropriately applied.

So this is hardly a celebration of all fragments. Incomplete sentences that bore, distract, or confuse readers should be corrected. But there are moments, whether under the archway or at a lonely railroad crossing, when fragments (or crots) work just fine.

More About Crots and Fragments:

• Crot
• Correcting Phrase Fragments
• Editing Exercise: Correcting Sentence Fragments