Definition:
A prose style characterized by sequences of fairly short simple sentences.
Etymology:
Term introduced by Edwin Herbert Lewis in The History of the English Paragraph, 1894Examples and Observations:
- "From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world."
(Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse," Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper, 1982) - "Segregating sentences are especially useful in descriptive and narrative writing. They analyze a complicated perception or action into its parts and arrange these in a significant order."
(Thomas S. Kane, The New Oxford Guide to Writing, Oxford Univ. Press, 1988) - "The virtues of the segregating style are power and clarity; its vices are monotony and disjunction. It's jumpy; it doesn't differentiate one piece of action or argument or information from another. It may sound detached, sometimes cold. In corporate writing it can lead to what one of my clients calls 'bureaucratic staccato.' It's weak at linkage and, consequently, not much good for sustained and subtle argumentation. Musically, too, its dynamics are poor, and it all goes at pretty much the same pace."
(Mark Tredinnick, Writing Well: The Essential Guide, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)
