Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In today’s Doonesbury, a new (and younger) audience confronts a stylistic quirk of some television hews reporting:

This time the participles (PRP, PSP) are pretty much a side issue, though their sense of urgency — I would say, rather, “immediacy” — appears right away, in panel 2.

In a previous appearance (“Participles of urgency”, from 9/21/15), the participles played a central role. At the end of the news story:

Reporter: From all of us, using only participles, conveying urgency, good night!

Mike Doonesbury: From me, fed up, my dreams of a complete sentence shattered, good-bye!

The importance of complete sentences in conversation is over-rated. Seriously over-rated.

But of course a consistent heavily participial style would be quirky and obtrusive, just as ridiculous as Garry Trudeau makes it out to be.

This entry was posted on June 5, 2016 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Style and register. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.