Definition:
Sentence style that appears to follow the mind as it worries a problem through, mimicking the "rambling, associative syntax of conversation." (Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose). Opposite of periodic sentence style. See also: Running Style in Thomas's "On Cloning."
Examples:
- "It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it."
(Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep) - "It's like I was making a prison break, you know. And I'm heading for the wall, and I trip and I twist my ankle, and they throw the light on you, you know. So, somehow I get through the crying and I keep running. Then the cursing started. She's firing at me from the guard tower: 'Son of a bang! Son of a boom!' I get to the top of the wall, the front door. I opened it up, I'm one foot away. I took one last look around the penitentiary, and I jumped!"
(George Costanza, describing his break-up to Jerry, in "The Ex-Girlfriend" episode of Seinfeld) - "He could feel it under his feet. [The train] came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing groundshudder watching it till it was gone."
(Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)
