But what's wrong with the original, "I came, I saw, I conquered"?  Style manuals do indicate that when there is a series of parallel, closely related clauses commas can be used to separate them.  Let's remember that punctuation marks are a fairly crude attempt to represent relationships, constituents, and meanings.  They've developed historically in a way that is both linguistic and cultural, and it's a mistake to assume, or teach, that they are a consistent and complete system.

Herb

Subject: Re: Where do fragments fit in?
 
Tim,
 
They could write: "I came. I saw. I conquered."
Or they could write: "I cam; I saw; I conquered." 
 
Why not teach them these instead?
 
Paul
 
P.S. -- I do agree, however, that one should try to avoid "never" statements in teaching. After all, sweeping generalizations are never true!

"Hadley, Tim" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Ed,

 

Excellent point. This reminds me of the old adage that in the first year of the study of a language (any language), you learn all the rules, and then in the second year you learn to break all of those rules that you learned in the first year because they don't really represent the language as it is actually spoken (or written). Another adage that fits this situation is "The young person knows the rules; the old person knows the exceptions."

 

We have also had a fairly heated discussion along these same lines here at Texas Tech about comma slices / run-on sentences in freshman comp classes, where a construction like "I came, I saw, I conquered" was marked as a comma splice error. It was felt by some professors (not me) that this was necessary in order to teach freshmen the basics of sentence construction, and then later they could learn to judiciously "violate the rules" at their discretion-but not now. (I guess for now, they have to say, "I came, and I saw, and I conquered.")

 

I don't think I would ever tell a skilled, mature writer that they could/should never use fragments, which in the hands of a skilled stylist can be an excellent rhetorical tool.

  

Tim

 

Tim Hadley

Research Assistant, The Graduate School

Ph.D. candidate, Technical Communication and Rhetoric

Texas Tech University


---------------------------------


From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2005 8:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Where do fragments fit in?


 

Craig, Tim, and others:
     I recently studied all 50 essays in The Best American Essays of 2001 and 2003, carefully looking for sentence fragments and being very, very conservative in deciding what would count as a fragment (no dialog was considered, for example).  I was surprised to discover there were 505 altogether and that only four essays used no fragments at all.  The median was six fragments per essay.  The more I thought about it, the less surprised I became.  How can one be in favor of naturalness, emphasis, and economy of wording and be against what we commonly call fragments?  Incidentally, that term is not used in Quirk et al or Greenbaum to denote what most English teachers call fragments.
     I'll talk a little about this research in my ateg presentation in Chicago.

Ed Schuster

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