Grammar girl here, I know many of your fiction writers, aspiring writers, are just

shake your heads when you read non-traditional grammar and fiction stories.

So I thought it might be fun to hear from someone who has to manage the crazy grammar

that writers try, and sometimes succeed to put through the editing process and into book

form.

Today, we have a guest, Grammarian, Julian Pavia, senior editor at Crown Books, a division

of Random House.

As Julian's example, he's using the new novel Nocturnal by Scott Sigler, which came out

April 3rd from Crown, and he's looking at Sigler's tendency to use sentence fragments.

A sentence fragment is something that isn't a complete sentence.

Often sentence fragments are missing the subject that would be present in a sentence, but they

can also be missing the predicate.

Here's what Julian wrote, starting with the opening lines of Sigler's new book.

You're not welcome here, Paul.

Most places in the world, a statement like that sounded normal, unfriendly, perhaps, but

still common, still acceptable.

Most places, but not at a Catholic church.

If you're like me, it's perfectly clear to you what Scott is saying here.

Granted, the lines have a certain clipped cadence that may not be everyone's stylistic

cup of tea, but they make sense, and Scott's conveying information efficiently, getting

a lot across in relatively few words.

There's always a catch, and the catch here is that apart from the line of dialogue, there's

...