Word: syntax
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...High-stakes battles over corruption and development rage on without him. As in A Guest of Honour, The House Gun and most of her 11 other novels, Gordimer weaves together big national issues and small personal crises. Yet this time she also uses local vocabularies, incomplete sentences and elliptical syntax that some readers may find annoying (helpfully, she appends a glossary of indigenous language terms). Get used to it. Among the blessings of apartheid's fall is a new willingness among South African writers to experiment, get funky and abandon worthy subjects altogether. That seems to be what J.M. Coetzee...
...diction. The poem’s narrator babbles out initial exposition in a long stanza, then pauses, takes a breath, and recaps in a single line: “There is a note in my pocket.” In this and other poems, Robinson’s syntax is the best part of her style. The pacing of her language is exquisite. Lines that are formal and decorously slow contrast with punctuation-less lines that rush into one another. Robinson can sustain the tension of a phrase over several lines, even through self-interruption. In “From...
...paused briefly to gather his thoughts. "But that common-sense message got lost because the school board wrapped it up in so much Afrocentric jargon and education-speak that people thought the board was trying to dumb down the curriculum by teaching bad grammar and syntax. There was enough mangled phraseology in its resolution to make 16 episodes of Martin. But wait, let me get the Kingfish in on this. He's an expert on malapropisms...
Such spectacles as these, suggesting the start of a full-blown trend, just might put a tiny chink in the razor business and a serious crimp in Kiam's sunny sales pitch, not to mention his syntax. "Is Don Johnson of the prehistoric cavemen who didn't know how to start fires nor learned good grooming?" he spluttered recently. Indeed, a little perspective might be useful right now, although the historical foundation for this great stubble bubble stops somewhat short of the dawn...
...Lehman Brothers is a good deal more persuasive than his tentative efforts to link an ugly power struggle to a supposed national preoccupation with quick results and a runaway trend toward bigness. The narrative is slow in starting, repetitive, and too often dotted with clichs and awkward syntax. It sorely lacks a detailed explanation of Lehman's management structure, and it is overburdened with irrelevant details such as whose dog was vomiting while key negotiations were under way. Still, the book's eventual energy is propulsive, and even at its weakest moments, Auletta's tale is buoyed along...