SIN (MORE) BOLDLY
by Shelly Holder

Good advice though it may be, I am choosing to ignore all of it, since I have created a personal grammar that adheres to my needs both moral and punctuational.

Sirius Black to Remus Lupin
August Twenty-fourth, Summer of 1975
The Shoebox Chronicles

The Fragment:

In GRAMMER B, the fragment is called the crot and has a wider (and acknowledged) function than the fragment. Really, the two are different. For purposes of this paper, however, they will be compared.

            Example

            Complete sentence                                We went to the store.

            Fragment                                                Went to the store.

            Crot                                                        Went. Left. Returned. Shopping-- meaningless.



Code Switching:

I advocate more than just the awareness/ability to break rules, but the practice of breaking rules. Code switching is an important part of understanding/the transition to GRAMMER B, but the best tool to have is experience.

            Exercise: Change these sentences into fragments and crots.

1) The bees buzzed in the afternoon summer sun.

Fragment: _____________________________________________________________________

Crot:__________________________________________________________________________

2) Bob was a nice man, as well as handsome.

Fragment: _____________________________________________________________________

Crot:__________________________________________________________________________

3) Sometimes, things did not go my way.

Fragment: _____________________________________________________________________

Crot:__________________________________________________________________________



maneuvers/conventions/devices:

GRAMMER B is a completed grammatical style, and therefore has internal supports (infrastructure) just like Edited American.  There are similar maneuvers/ conventions/ devices used throughout GRAMMER B, including crots, lists, extreme sentence length variation, parentheticals, dashes, semi-colons, colons, slashes, ellipses, font differences (bold, italics, all caps) and more. Construct a brief paragraph using some of these techniques.

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Le Fin:

GRAMMER B is not "bad grammer." It's is not "broken rules" or "ignored rules;" rather new rules for an alternative style that has branched off on the evolutionary tree. GRAMMER B is meant to provide another option for communication, rather than a "better" or "more fit" one. In that spirit, I want to show writers how they can benefit from GRAMMER B...

"And especially show how writers-- respected, published authors taught in high schools and colleges-- have used the alternate style. Sucessfully. Seriously. Beautifully. Intelligently."
- Winston Weathers