Is anyone else here a little obsessed with sentence fragments? I don't use them all the time, but I do use them regularly. I think they can be powerful. Of course, you probably don't want to overuse them. Or maybe you do. How often do use guys use sentence fragments and what do you think they do for your writing?
I use them a ton. I think it comes from the copywriting - sentences in ads are far more effective when they're short, punchy and simple. They're good for rhythm.
I use them to amplify the intensity of my sentence at places, they can be seriously powerful for things like emphasis but use them too much and they start to become repetitive and lose that effect. Part of paragraph rhythm is to have variety, after all. I'm still figuring all of this stuff out tbh, and proof of that is how I got scolded for this very thing at the workshop a few days ago
Hit or miss. Like anything else. Effective when done well. Affected when not. All fragments. What I just wrote. Antecedents implied? Or too douchey? Up to the reader.
I tend to use fragments in dialog to portray a character who alternates between run on (long) and incomplete (short) sentences. This might not be the right place to mention a somewhat related problem that I run into quite frequently in dialog. I have a character say something, then adds a fragment to add something else. An example is "If they can't get involved, even surreptitiously, they look the other way because we're doing what they can't — taking bad guys off the street and out of the game." For this example, I should probably use a colon. But colons just don't look right in dialog. Neither do en or em dashes. And it's certainly not a pause where I'm frequently told to use an ellipsis. Any advice on how to add this type of fragment to dialog would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Grammatically the punctuation you have is fine. That's exactly what I would do. I think you might want to tighten it up a bit, and, actually, I think you could ditch the "taking bad guys off the street and out of the game." It sounds to stiff and repetitive since it was basically implied by exactly what came before it. That's my take on it. Even if you decide to leave it in, you've got down the grammar.
A period would work. Make it an actual fragment. They're OK in dialogue, even if the narration is written painstakingly to conform to proper grammar. People just talk that way.
