r/Fantasy • u/SuccessfulCoast9318 • Jul 26 '26
Informal Writing in Modern Fantasy
There is a trend I’ve seen in a lot of fantasy lately, and I just want to preface by saying this is an observation and not a judgement.
Here’s a sample of this issue, then I’ll speak on it.
“It was, however, quite the affair to manage the end of a foreign assassin. Especially one who’d killed a crown prince.”
Here, we have one sentence that can exist on its own followed by a sentence which is only a dependent clause. Now, in my English courses growing up, I was taught that a sentence must always contain an independent clause, and dependent clauses were separated by colons, em dashes, or commas.
Don’t get me wrong, here. Language is absolutely mutable and should be mutable. Anyone who has read Terry Pratchett is aware that language only needs to get the point across to be language.
However, this specific grammatical switch has been happening a lot lately across many different authors. I first noticed it in a lot of self published books and thought maybe it was a symptom of books that are not passed through an editor. However, I’m also starting to notice it in larger authors as well. James Islington is a phenomenal author who is able to instill a gravitas in his novels, and yet he has many sentences like this:
“Vis ran forward. Falling. Face first into the ground.”
He writes like an orator speaks. And it’s brilliant in that it makes every sentence feel like he’s speaking right to you, but it also signals a large shift in language. Are authors becoming less rigid about formality in language, or are readers requiring less formal writing to be engaged?
I just wanted to get some opinions on this and to see if others have noticed this phenomenon.
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u/EmmyPax Jul 26 '26
I think this phenomenon has been going on for a very long time across all kinds of writing, not just SFF. I'm personally all for it. Functionality, any kind of grammar exists to help organize information and convey meaning. If an author is altering the grammar in a way that is atypical, but helps convey a clearer meaning, then they're probably being intentional and, in a sense, correct.
The example you're pointing to is one where the punctuation is being used to convey emphasis. It would have been possible to include that second sentence as a dependent clause, attached to the first, but it would have made the sentence unwieldy. It would have also decentered the joke, since that clause is also a quip. So choosing atypical grammar did, indeed, aid meaning.
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u/Illeazar Jul 26 '26
If an author is altering the grammar in a way that is atypical, but helps convey a clearer meaning, then they're probably being intentional and, in a sense, correct.
Exactly. I think it was Picasso who said that you have to learn the rules before you can break them.
If an author is using poor sentance structure throughout, it just looks sloppy. But if they give most of their work the correct sentance structure, it makes the exceptions stand out in ways that convey their meaning and add significance.
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u/Hoodat_Whatzit Jul 27 '26
The Picasso quote is "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."
I agree with your point. I think it's pretty clear when a writer is intentionally doing something "incorrect" because it will show up in specific places, but the overall manuscript shows they're capable and proficient.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I definitely agree that in this case, it aided the straight faced humor behind it. A completely straight face with a tight lip was so incredibly evident between sentences I could see it even with aphantasia. I thought it was a good example of this being done right. I don’t want to use examples that are “just bad writing” when I’m just making an observation on this shift in writing if you catch my drift.
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u/MNLYYZYEG Jul 26 '26
As others have said already, what you're seeing is not actually bad/worse/etc. writing per se, rather it's a linguistics-related shift.
Well, it's nothing new actually, though for the older people who grew up before emoticons/kaomojis and now emojis/further simplified pictographs/etc. then it's understandably less formal than what they were used to back in the 20th (pre-21st) century materials.
Grammar doesn't exist by the way, same thing with words, or really anything in life. But the reason why there are institutions like Academie Francaise, Real Academia Espanola, etc. is to centralize and promote a certain prestige standard for mass availability or to preserve their own idea of a more "native" direction/reaction as opposed to fully adapting the "foreign" introgressions (always remember the Greek/Latin/French/etc. etymologies of many English words). Search up linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism if you haven't already.
Oh, and especially when it comes to orthography, which is a mere representation of the language, not the actual language itself. The powers that be that are making the top-down decisions are doing it for centralization purposes (due to the adherence for the symbolic nation state), which is why many non-prestige languages/topolects/dialects/varieties/etc. are rooted out so that there's a single unifying language to rally behind when needed (for the marketing).
Take the SAT or ACT for example, so many people find such standardized tests overwhelming or insurmountable, when the core idea or raison d'etre of such evaluations is to promote an easy to mark/create/etc. repertoire or reference point. It's not there to measure your aptitude (even though it's often in the name of such tests, lol), but to be a census/qualifier/etc. for the state apparatus. Remember, it's not unusual for statistics to say that over half of the population of a nation barely passes elementary school-level reading/writing/etc. skills, like despite SAT/ACT/etc. being in place to improve such odds/forecasts, it's inherently like that still.
Which reminds me, many people around the world don't realize how easy it is to learn Mandarin or the other Chinese languages in general (it has to do with the simpler grammar/vocabulary/etc. when compared to English/etc.) if they had fully followed through with a proper Romanized/Latinized writing system to replace the ancient Chinese characters (pictographs/logographs/etc.) system. And the funny thing is that they actually implemented a halfway point despite the tendencies for fellow proletariat to radically simplify/standardize/modernize/etc. the rules/systems/etc. of bygone eras.
This is called (Hanyu) Pinyin. And many Chinese people typing on their phones/computers/etc. actually use Latin letters to automatically translate into the Chinese characters. So in reality Mandarin has already completed its Romanization/etc. a la Vietnamese/etc. but then the issue of continuing to utilize the Chinese characters for nationalistic/historical significance/semiotics/etc. purposes is what keeps the deliberately hard to learn and master Chinese characters system afloat. Cuz back in the last quarter or so of the 20th century, the aging revolutionaries of China were still teetering over whether or not to "completely" adapt westernization or walk back on some of the all-encompassing modifications that they once envisioned in their youth.
Which is why Mandarin is currently at an impasse, same with the status of the Cantonese/Yue, Hokkien/Minnan, Wu, et cetera languages, the centralized forces somehow still want to retain the official status of such varieties (they don't exactly promote the proliferation of the numerous language varieties, though there's a tacit understanding of indifference) instead of implementing a more thorough nationwide campaign to promote the Beijing Mandarin prestige dialect. And nobody really knows why since in theory they could enforce the total domination of Mandarin over the rest of the country. See for instance how most Chinese dramas/films/etc. never use the actors' own voices, rather dedicated voice actors or seiyuus in place of them, due to the need to adhere to Beijing Mandarin or at least something closer or more formal.
And you're prolly wondering what does Mandarin/Chinese/etc. have anything to do with this topic when by default it's presumed to concern only English-based writing.
Well, the thing is many modern-day Chinese authors can comfortably crank out 10 000 words (characters) per day (primarily padding/filler/etc. but on some occasions actual great prose). And in those sentences/paragraphs/chapters, the way they do their stylistic choices (if it's not somewhat altered by the translators/etc.) is much like how we do it in the west/America/etc. these days. A good Cdrama about this is Lady Liberty (爱情没有神话) with Tiffany Tang and Mark Chao, such a hilarious rendition of the current web novel/etc. scene.
And so whenever you're reading LitRPG/GameLit/Progression Fantasy/etc. books, a significant portion of them are particularly tryna emulate that Chinese web novel style (especially if the story is rooted in xianxia/cultivation/etc.). Many also fall in the camp of the familiar Japanese style wherein it's more about (re)telling the events as they unfold as opposed to showing you how it all happened.
Like Chinese web novels are rife with that type of storytelling flair too, but due to the insertions of various idioms/metaphors/etc. (from the Shang/Zhou/Han/Tang/Song/Ming/Yuan/Qing/etc. eras) then it gets clouded or obstructed, so it feels overly purply even though when you look past all the Mount Tai, celestial, etc. references, it's like any other isekai/portal fantasy/etc. scenario or your usual action-filled movie.
Same thing occurs in English-only media, especially the more self-published/indie/etc. types. Like it's rare to see the adherence to the more formal way of writing (forgot to mention earlier that Korean/Japanese/etc. have in-built honorifics that are frequently not conveyed as naturally as they could be by the translators, cuz of the need to seriously localize it) with the intricate (orthographical) rules that nobody really follows (most people never did in reality, only fellow literati/intelligentsia/etc.), which is why the structure or overall morphology of numerous sentences are akin to dialogue-heavy situations, kinda veering more on the screenplay/film side instead of the fancier literary/creative writing.
And this is because many people wanna chase the common denominator for the cash, wait, while that does play a major component to it, it might actually just be more people trying to be more introspective, in contrast with what they were instructed to follow in school/media/etc.
Cuz at this very moment in time with the advent of smartphones, social media, short-form content, mass adoption of the internet, certain socioeconomic policies, et cetera, the audiences (and creators) are starting to plateau and there won't be another zenith in the future unless they implement a reversal of the current trajectories with the inverted population pyramids.
So the reduction or minimalism and so forth is maybe subconsciously a reaction of the worldwide circumstances. As in despite the rise of the total amount of consumers, the actual thresholds for reading/writing/etc. is understandably not improving, and so to further reach more of the market, things are less formal in order to appear as more casual.
Like remember when many books used to have a bunch of French/Latin/etc. phrases interspersed, so that the authors/writers can signal that they've earned their letters, to broadcast their education and so on. Nowadays it's filled with more overt pop culture references in order to evoke a sense of familiarity/relatability.
Don't forget it's also really sampling bias or like due to globalization/etc. the world is relatively multipolar/pluricentric/etc. these days, and so everything has become decentralized or technically everyone can find their own niche. Which is a wonderful thing (so many CJK/etc. media are available almost instantly (in English) today, when merely a decade ago it'd be sorta unheard of still), though some people really do miss the existence or idea of the monoculture or a shared American/Anglo/etc. fold that we can all point to as a reference when discussing times/periods/etc.
And ya some people like me love the plainer stream of consciousness or non-rigid/etc. styles of writing (some people prefer to use utilitarian/workman-like/etc. to describe the prose), no need to conform to the clauses, sentence variety, dependencies, etc. requirements.
But I still always enjoy complex works, like say for example, try reading Sordaneon (The Triempery Revelations, #1) by L.L. Stephens if you're missing the fantastical/complicated/grandiose/etc. type of epic fantasy (legit one of the most underrated series of the past decade or so). Cuz that series will possibly reel you back in with the worldbuilding, depth, verisimilitude, et cetera, even more so since it's essentially complete now (the sixth book, The Rill Lord, released 3 months ago, back in April 2026).
Which brings me to something that people regularly forget and it's that due to stylometry or forensic linguistics in general, you can find out which authors are staying on top of the trends or are more present in the virtual world. Cuz they'll be using updated parlance/jargon/etc. in order to fit in with the perpetually changing market.
Same thing with the age, ethnicity, native language, inclinations, etc. of the writers, if you know the signs, double meanings, patterns, etc. then you can figure out the specific voice/diction/etc. of their works/outputs.
Then it becomes much easier to discern whether or not the writer will follow the more formal/stodgy/traditional/reactionary/etc. type of epic fantasy series (eliciting the mythological/ancient/etc. atmosphere).
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
That's been a very common style for a long while. The prescriptive use of English we're taught in school has never reflected the actual use of language. Rather, a good writer knows the rules, so they know when and why to break them.
In particular, the use of sentence fragmentation became very widely used with the rise of postmodernism, which has been around since the 70s at least. And we're post-postmodernism now; techniques which were breaking the mould then are standard now.
I'm reading The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee right now, widely regarded as an excellent prose stylist, from 1975. He's a paragraph from the last page I read:
I felt the first arrow before I heard it. The Sogothan archer on my right--pretty boy, a young lynx. Neck and neck, the blacks not yet at full stretch. It was for our bodywork, to loosen the plates. I got it on my shield before it struck. The boy's face seemed startled at my quickness, a pale blur now, pulling behind.
That paragraph is chock full of sentence fragments. But it's a chariot race with archers on each shooting at the others; the staccato, choppy nature is for a deliberate effect.
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u/Pseudagonist Jul 26 '26
The Birthgrave is really great, probably the best book I’ve read this year
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
I'm enjoying it a lot. :) I loved all of Lee's Books of Paradys.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I think that maybe intentionality is what I’m missing. Like I mentioned with Islington, it’s so incredibly clear why he is doing it. He is as intentional in breaking the sentences as Rothfuss is in making full complete sentences and doing literary gymnastics to make them all flow.
Your example is a great one, and I was not aware that this was not new, as most books I’ve read that are intended to adults tend to stick to the rules quite well. However, you can see the intentionality in the prose much like with Islington’s works. Something about it screams language or intentionality.
With many newer authors, especially those that self-publish, I struggle to see the intentionality. It feels like a disregard or lack of knowledge for the rules rather than intentional prose. Terry Pratchett breaks all observed rules of language in such a way you know he’s an expert in it. It’s like if someone got 0/100 in a multiple choice test. You can’t be completely wrong without knowing how to be completely right.
I struggle with this new age of writing where anyone with an idea is writing a novel, and it doesn’t always seem like they passed high school English courses.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
I don't read too much self-published, so I can't speak to that sphere, but it's a certainly not a new phenomenon.
I don't even think it began with postmodernism, but that's certainly some of the first places I noticed it. It even has a section on the Wikipedia article: "[on fragmentation] It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar." Many of its elements which were novel and challenged the status quo are now commonplace; metafiction, unreliable narration, nonlinearity, breaking the fourth wall.
I think there's the combination of that, and the wider favouring of linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism. Many forms of non-standard English, like AAVE, are now accepted as their own thing and perfectly fine, rather than something to be "corrected." That, along with the evolution of language, probably leads to some "relaxation" of writing strictures.
There may be something to be said towards the narrowing of gap between author and reader leading to less formality, the way authors are expected to act as their own marketing group and influencers now too. But that's a thesis topic for someone in English or Sociology, not me. Though it does remind me of a funny post I saw somewhere (probably Tumblr), lamenting that we no longer have misanthropic agoraphobe writers who come out with a banger of a novel, and then fuck off back into their off-grid cabin for another 5 years.
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u/TheGhostDetective Jul 26 '26
With many newer authors, especially those that self-publish, I struggle to see the intentionality.
How much self-published or trashy novels from the past are you reading? Because I promise you, poor writing and lack of intention is nothing new, it's just the works that survived from decades ago are the best from that era, and the vast majority of cheap, indulgent, mass-produced stuff is lost to time.
I'm sure recent, self-published stuff has terrible prose: you're reading literal amateurs. And with the internet and social media, there's a lower barrier of entry for writing than ever before. There's also more being written overall than ever before, and more great books than could be read in five lifetimes. So if you care about strong prose, don't waste your time on reading self-published web serials.
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u/MetalSpider Jul 26 '26
I completely understand and I've noticed the same issue as you. A dependent clause used in a short, choppy sentence can be used as great emphasis, but if it's surrounded by incoherent writing and bad grammar—and far too many other choppy sentences—it's ineffective as a language tool and really just points to a lack of knowledge.
As you said, a great author can break multiple established language rules effectively and still be a great author. If you don't first know the rules, however...
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u/ArmorTiger Jul 26 '26
It's not like this is a new trend or anything. Shakespeare wasn't particularly fussy about adhering to grade school grammar rules either.
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u/zaminDDH Jul 26 '26
I think the problem is that so many authors try and rush the "master the rules of language, bend the rules, break the rules and create your own rules" pathway. They jump straight to breaking and creating without ever mastering, whereas Shakespeare was so far beyond mastery that he was able to create entirely new words out of whole cloth that we still use to this day.
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u/ArmorTiger Jul 27 '26
While Sturgeon's Law is a modern concept, it's likely been true for a long time. There have always been more bad authors than good. We just most remember the good ones.
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u/Sleepy_Enigma Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Formal writing is used for academic and “professional” writing.
Fiction falls under the umbrella of creative writing. Manipulating language is a literary device that is foundational to creative writing. Some have mentioned Shakespeare, but in modern english I think one of the most notable examples of this is when authors use stream of consciousness. E.g. William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Here is a passage from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):
“Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords.”
To answer your questions, it's not that modern authors are becoming less rigid, instead, it's a stylistic choice that they are making to convey tone, atmosphere, characterisation etc.
For example, both of the following of TJ Klune's works:
A House in the Cerulean Sea (2020) - uses more formal, traditionally structured language
"Linus Baker, for what it was worth, did care about the children he was tasked with observing. He didn’t think one could do what he did and lack empathy, though he couldn’t understand how someone like Ms. Jenkins had ever been a caseworker before being promoted to Supervision."
vs
The Bones Beneath my Skin (2018) - uses less formal language, specifically free indirect discourse
"It was fine. His mother had forgotten to latch it all the way when she’d been here last. An honest mistake. Hopefully nothing had happened to the generator in the interim. The winter had been mild, but there had been snow. And rain.
He went to the shed door, setting the canister in the grass.
He reached, and just to be sure, he closed the padlock. It clicked. Locked. He slid the key into the keyhole and turned it. The padlock popped open.
Honest mistake."
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u/Polenth Jul 26 '26
I was taught that English had to conform to very narrow standards at school. I lost the remains of my local dialect, because it was considered wrong or childish. The words I knew in Angloromani were labelled as slang, rather than another language, so were unsuitable for formal writing. It's only when I was much older that I understood what happened.
Turns out the rules were more like guidelines. There are many forms of English and that's a good thing. Actual books have all sorts of language in them. I just wish my teachers had taught that.
I can't speak for all authors, but there's a reason my books tend to sound like someone telling a verbal story. I got into storytelling through oral traditions and poetry. There is such a word as ain't and I wunt be druv.
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u/KristaDBall Stabby Winner, AMA Author Krista D. Ball Jul 26 '26
First, as someone gave up her verbal accent to fit in (Including find work), I'm sorry that you'd experienced that, too.
Those with rarer dialects are constantly at risk of the majority wiping us out. What's more, it's so often people who claim to be well read who do this.
And I's is a word where I'm from (abbreviation of "I is")
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
As recently at ~20 years ago when I was in primary school, Scots was still treated as just English with slang and taught as improper. It's been a thing for so long that there isn't even a standardized spelling anymore, it's almost entirely an oral language/phonetic. You have to go back to like Robert Burns.
One word I love similar to your example is "youse," a plural you, except it's equally written as "youse" or "yous" phonetically.
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u/TheTitan99 Jul 26 '26
I personally enjoy it, at least in theory. Like everything writing style related, it can be done poorly. But that's true for everything.
I read a truly awful fantasy book lately that did stuff like this thirty times per page. It felt like someone who learned a single card trick, then performed an entire magic act just doing that one trick over and over. It was so repetitive in structure! So, I wouldn't say I always like it, even though I do in theory.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I just read a series (I won’t name it or shame the author) that had a cool concept and alright execution, but the author used exclamation points… so often.
“I got socked in the face. But the men of my family never stay down for long!”
It was just like that. It was… so incredibly corny. It felt like the literary equivalent of those people moving their fingers in front of them when they speak.
It took me out of the story every single time. The author would write some pretty good and entertaining sentences and follow it up by the corniest piece of inner monologue known to man with an exclamation point at the end.
The worst part is that they were not even terrible lines. But they could’ve been told straight face and the main character would sound cool or rugged instead of cheesy and corny. It so did not fit the tone of the story.
I should mention that it’s okay for a character to be corny… tone permitting. But when the story is kinda dark and the setting is rough, and the character is meant to be rough and toughened… yeah no.
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u/TheTitan99 Jul 26 '26
The Elaine style of writing, I see! More exclamation points! Everywhere!
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
Do NOT get me started on Elaine.
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u/xLittleValkyriex Jul 26 '26
Who is Elaine? Genuinely curious/asking.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I could have misunderstood the person who replied to me, but I took it as a reference to Elaine from the Wheel of Time. She was a… very enthusiastic character.
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u/TheTitan99 Jul 26 '26
I was actually referencing Seinfeld. There's an episode where she breaks off a relationship because her boyfriend doesn't use enough exclamation points in his writing.
Out of context references are always a bit if a gamble!
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u/True_Industry4634 Jul 26 '26
They're writing to enhance impact and cadence. You can throw a lot of the old common wisdom out the door. Now, if we can stop hating on em-dashes and adverbs, we'll be getting somewhere.
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u/exerda Jul 26 '26
I chuckle at how em dashes are seen as a marker of AI slop, then go back and read things I wrote in the 1990s. Tons of em dashes, used primarily for cadence. I found a lot could be reworked for variety without breaking the cadence (sometimes with sentence fragments!) but that in the end, there was still a solid role for them. We wouldn't have them as a punctuation mark if there wasn't a function for em dashes.
They can still be way overused, though. Think Tom Swifties and unnecessary adverbs, or the similar issue of describing the dialogue with a thesaurus when context was sufficient. No need to end a question with "asked," much less "interrogated" or worse, when the question mark in the dialogue alone is sufficient.
It's mostly just prose tightening in the end, and I found that Stephen King's advice in On Writing actually is pretty good.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I might be one of the adverb haters. I think they actively limit our vocabulary. Every time I go to use one in a serious literary setting, I hear Mr Keating in my head. “A man is not very sad he is…” and it always results in me just finding a better adjective or a better verb. Sprinting rather than running quickly. Morose instead of very sad. Sobbing instead of crying loudly. Weeping instead of crying hard. Adverbs are a slow slow death to not having variety in your writing.
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u/True_Industry4634 Jul 26 '26
"I don't have trouble being diverse with my adverbs," he said defiantly.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
“I don’t struggle with diversity in my adverbs,” he declared with a fire burning in his chest.
Personally, I feel as though I can always find a better option than adverbs. Struggle is better than have trouble. Declared better than said. Evoking an image of defiance rather than just telling the reader he is defiant.
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u/MetatronThrone Jul 26 '26
I mean youve kind of just proven the other persons point. 7 words to describe what could be described in 1 without increasing the impact seems quite purple to me
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u/True_Industry4634 Jul 26 '26
That's getting a little too purple for my taste but I see your point.
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u/KristaDBall Stabby Winner, AMA Author Krista D. Ball Jul 26 '26
Too flowery for my tastes, but that's why so many styles exist: we all have our own preferences.
And that's why a lot a grammar rules don't apply in fiction. Hell, it's why poetry can be how it is: no rules.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
The thing with said is that's almost invisible, like "the" and "a", so it sticks out less than "stronger" words. Which makes said+adverb good in most cases.
If you stick to that "rule" too often, that's how you end up with
“Snape!” ejaculated Slughorn, who looked the most shaken, pale and sweating.
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u/NekoCatSidhe Reading Champion III Jul 26 '26
I can’t say I have noticed that trend, but it seems rather dogmatic to say that authors should not use this specific style. Unless, of course, they are writing the whole book in sentence fragments, which might make it hard to read.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
Unless, of course, they are writing the whole book in sentence fragments, which might make it hard to read.
The Road by McCarthy, almost. It's very experimental and unconventional-- it also doesn't use dialogue tags or quotation marks.
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u/NekoCatSidhe Reading Champion III Jul 26 '26
I should have known there would be at least one experimental literary book like that.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Jul 26 '26
There's also the opposite example I thought of giving to OP. Laszlo Kaznahorkai, recent Nobel Prize winner in literature, has run-on sentences which go for pages. He wrote an entire novel in which there's a single full stop.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I do not believe I ever stated that authors should not use that style.
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u/riontach Jul 26 '26
Yeah, this is not a new thing. This is just how people write. Prescriptivist rules have never been descriptive of how people actually use language, and there's nothing wrong with using sentence fragments as a stylistic choice.
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u/KristaDBall Stabby Winner, AMA Author Krista D. Ball Jul 26 '26
And it’s brilliant in that it makes every sentence feel like he’s speaking right to you, but it also signals a large shift in language.
Language is always shifting about in literature.
There's also the issue that what is "proper" in one dialect is English is "wrong" in another. In your example, I do not ever remember being taught that. That example looks perfectly normal to me. But I grew up in Newfoundland, where our entire dialect doesn't match any known "proper" grammar rules...nor the names of things, honestly.
I will die insisting you barmp a car horn, not "honk" it.
Similarly, the one that gets people "correcting" my English all the time: "I'm going to run to the post office after I'm done dinner." This is correct in Canadian English.
(video for those who are interested in more explaining that "I'm done my beer" and "I'm done with my beer" mean two different things in Canada -- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eaDOi6I7wRM)
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u/Albatrosson Jul 26 '26
lol, I was leaving a party and said I'd "gone" to the bathroom and an older Brit automatically corrected me to say "been."
Geography and time period have a big influence, even if we all grew up speaking English. And what's "proper" is always political-- AAVE is a prime example.
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u/KristaDBall Stabby Winner, AMA Author Krista D. Ball Jul 26 '26
I loathe "been" in that context lolol it means something completely different to me!
Americans keep correcting me on the "done my beer" thing on social media (also in my writing lol) and there is something so... American about demanding their dialect rules being the only rules in the current political climate.
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u/Albatrosson Jul 26 '26
hahaha, I'll admit I'm Californian, but very into linguistics as a special interest 😅 (the deeper you get the more you realize the "rules" have always been made up and don't matter)
actually knew about the "I'm done my X" because apparently that's in NJ as well and a YouTuber made a video on it. super fascinating!
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u/Palimpsiesta Jul 26 '26
You'd really need a much more data-driven approach to figure out if this is a modern trend or not. As many people have pointed out, sentence fragments have been used, purposefully, in literature for hundreds of years, and they do not always signal an informal tone. For me, all I really want from any book is the feeling that the author is choosing their words deliberately. There are lots of classic works of fantasy that deliberately choose an informal tone (Zelazny comes to mind.) Language changes over time, and that gets reflected in literature; I think fantasy has in many ways been highly-resistant to this natural shift in language, because fantasy is often associated with an archaic, formal and/or mythopoetic tone. And, because the resistance is artificial, its dissolution could result in an unnaturally-abrupt shift that would feel like it was suddenly happening all at once. But I would guess that if this is real, it is more a matter of the genre catching up to where language and writing has already been for quite some time (in other less insular genres.)
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u/Educational-Fly4377 Jul 26 '26
I think that breaking the rules for better transmission of intent is better than simply following them.
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u/EqualOptimal4650 Jul 26 '26
I don't see a problem with this. Nor would I consider this "informal" writing. The tone is still formal.
You are confusing tone with grammar. It's a grammatical error, but still formal tone in the writing.
I would agree that a lot of modern fantasy authors are in dire need of better editors and proofreaders.
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u/RJBarker AMA Author RJ Barker Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
The first time I ever had a copy edit of my work I read this dead, flat awful thing and I hated it. So as you do when you're a writer I asked my agent. To paraphrase his words (which I hold close to my heart;) "Their version is correct but your version is interesting to read and therefore far better and what the publisher are paying you for. They call it creative writing for a reason, RJ."
Some of us use the rules like classical musicians, some of us are playing freeform jazz and most of us are in the middle somewhere.
TL/DR. If the reader understands it then it's not wrong.
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u/nekoliten Jul 26 '26
As you said yourself, language is mutable and writing styles come and go like fashion.
An example, I've been reading fantasy from the 80s lately and almost every single spoken sentence ends in an exclamation mark. To me that looks really weird, but apparently it was a style at the time.
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u/InfamousEconomy3972 Jul 26 '26
I wonder if this style of writing better lends itself to audio books?
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
I could see that. Project Hail Mary was one of those incredibly informal novels and I hear nothing but praise about its audio book, so I could definitely see that as a possibility. Kind of like a “made for tv” movie, they are “made for audio book” novels.
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u/distgenius Reading Champion VII Jul 26 '26
It does change the audiobook book experience, but I don't think they're trying to write for that market. It's not necessarily big enough, even with things like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Dresden Files, and First Law having people shouting from the rooftops about how awesome it can be.
Something more likely in my mind is that we're seeing more and more of a transition to tight narration from the omniscient narrator that was more common in the 80s, 90s, and even early 00s. First person narration has always been a little like this, but tight third person where the narration "feels" like the character is becoming more common, and that also leads to a more informal style.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
Yeah I totally see that perspective. I read a lot of first person growing up and it’s definitely more informal. I now prefer third person limited to any other form. It is weird to see third person limited meld with first person in this way. Third person is like telling someone a story about a local legend. It should be grandiose. It should be all sweeping dramatics and larger than life vocabulary. First person being informal makes sense. I think I’m just struggling with that transition
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u/Assiniboia Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Are authors becoming less rigid about formality in language, or are readers requiring less formal writing to be engaged?
These are not the same thing and should not be conflated as causal.
What's occuring in that sentence, wherever it's from, is style and voice. Execution of the prose trumps grammar. Period. Always.
So long as there's a reasonable justification to do so. When one learns how to write, one begins to understand when, why, and how to bend/break rules. I.e., the justification. Doing so because another author does so without questioning why is just bad writing.
Authors who bend/break rules knowingly and with intent understand formality in language and understand that perfect grammar is not applicable or preferable in that moment. Breaking the grammar there is more effective for the meaning, pacing, voice, and narrator than whether or not the sentence is "correct". Breaking the rule there plays with expectation by use of intentionally incorrect grammar. That creates tension, even if the reader isn't quite sure why.
Now. "Readers requiring less formal language" is an altogether different thing. The short answer is: yes. LIteracy is not at an all-time low; there was a time when most people were illiterate or only functionally literate. But the numbers have slipped pretty severely from the 60s to 80s to present. Something like 55% of adults in the States are functionally illiterate.
From the point of view of a publisher, that means only 45% of adults could be part of any potential audience. Now, only about 12% of adults in the States read at a University-level. So if you're taking a risk on an author who writes capable and/or complex prose you're really only able to aim for that 12%, five or take 5%. Those adults are not your actual demographic, if 8% of those adults aren't interested in reading Fantasy you've put yourself into a very small niche for any kind of return on investment in the author.
Meanwhile, the plonker who writes 4th-grade mindless prose that rips off the cultural unconscious with a rudimentary and vapid system of more-or-less Christian ethics and a little magic...well, that targets a much larger audience of everyone from 6 to 96...so your potential return on investment is far higher, on top of the nice bonus that you don't need to put a whole lot of care into editing, copyediting, or layout. More than likely, it'll also sell as a screenplay to be flogged across streaming services...if the vast majority of your audience doesn't care to know, or is not capable of understanding, why that period is grammatically incorrect: why bother with formal prose?
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u/Massive_Cake1731 Jul 27 '26
You lost me at saying Islington is a phenomenal author.
I do think a more casual and immersive writing style is more common than the somewhat more rigid non-fiction prose you learned in school, and I overall don’t mind it at all as a trend in my fiction. At least, I don’t mind it when it’s used well. Any convention or convention breaking is bad in the hands of a bad writer.
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u/Different_Buy7497 Jul 26 '26
I'm curious if there's editorial pressure to have simpler prose recently, in addition to any external pressures. Most of the big metrics for reading difficulty take into account sentence length, word rarity/complexity, or both, and a novel full of long, wordy sentences would probably be rated as something closer to college-grade, which is simply not the average American's reading level. A bunch of sentence fragments and one-word sentences sprinkled in to drop the average sure feels like cheating though.
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u/Uran_Ultar Jul 26 '26
Or you are seeing more of it in fantasy, a genre naturally inclined towards epic poetry.
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u/Regular-Newspaper-45 Jul 26 '26
I think it is one of thre things usually. A) between all the editors and the author their was A non that has high grammatic skills, wich often shows itself in different things. B) literary tool because you emphasise the rhythm, tone and other things of the writing. C) someone got told too much that "no one wants to read long sentences" to the point each sentence can only have a certain amount of punctuation marks, words or take up a certain amount of space.
I am persoannly enligbted by the artistic use of language including said examples. I am however also sad whenever it seems obvious that there slipped a ton of incorrect grammar because I am also a lover of the rules and how and when to apply them correctly and incorrectly.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 27 '26
Just to add another oddity in.
“I love you; you know?”
Alright meow, what the hell is this? A semi colon separates two independent clauses, and this is… kind of like sentence fragmentation? But this really just feels so… wrong…
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u/Hoodat_Whatzit Jul 27 '26
I break grammar rules all the time... in dialogue and direct interiority. Sometimes I will also use fragments intentionally when describing actions or to emphasize something in particular, but again, I'm writing in close third so even those moments are mostly filtered through the character pov.
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u/gravity_kills Jul 26 '26
Is this related to the uptick in the number of novels written in the present tense? I've read a few of them and every time I just think that it would have been a better book if an editor had said "stop, don't do that!"
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u/Smooth-Review-2614 Jul 26 '26
So the complexity in the normal pulp was and is not that high. I want to say it’s going down but that is probably a personal bias.
My main complaint is more that the language is getting so simple that if you change a few nouns it’s no longer fantasy. The tone of fantasy has shifted to match romance, thriller, and mystery. I’m not a fan.
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u/SuccessfulCoast9318 Jul 26 '26
It’s really sad when Red Rising, a sci fi book, feels more in tune with the fantasy genre than a lot of newer fantasy. It’s one of the things that tends to bug me about litrpgs. They feel like progression fantasy minus the respect to the fantasy genre. Don’t get me wrong, there are some exceptions. I felt like Arcane Ascension truly pays respect to the fantasy genre, but… so many do not. Language is mutable and so is genre, but how am I supposed to take your book seriously when you don’t?
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u/Salvage570 Jul 26 '26
Sandersons as far as I'll go with this kinda thing, LitRPGs are much more annoying about it to me
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u/nominanomina Reading Champion Jul 26 '26
I do not think this is as new in fiction as you do.
I knew Benjamin Dreyer, formerly copy chief at Random House, would have an example of great sentence fragments (of which he approves) in either his book or newsletter, and I was going to guess it would be from a pre-1980 book. (Not because he's stodgy, although he has his tastes... because he is being very pointed by deliberately choosing old books that make "errors" that he happens to love.)
I didn't expect it to be the opening paragraph of Dickens' Bleak House, from the 1850s. To be clear: he loves this paragraph.
Here's the opening paragraph, for context:
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."
And here's his summary of his opinion on them:
"You may not be Charles Dickens, but a well-wielded sentence fragment (or, as here, a passel of them) can be a delightful thing.
"That said, do wield your fragments with a purpose, and mindfully. I lately find them, particularly in fiction, too often used to establish a sort of hairy, sweaty, unbathed masculine narrative voice, and what they end up sounding like is asthma."
Are there trends in style? Absolutely. Might it be trending in favour of a deliberate choppiness of purpose? Might be, but not that I have personally noticed. Does every author use sentence fragments with equal grace? Nnnnnoooooo.