One. Word. Rant.

What. Is. The. Deal. With one-word sentences? Or, I suppose, a sentence composed of one-word sentences. Sentence fragments used to be bad enough, but now this? Our language is changing all the time; I know, for instance, that words like “whom” are fast going out of use. But. Really?

I can see the attraction of emphasis, especially in middle-grade books, but I feel that using one-word sentences more than once in a book becomes overkill, a lazy, hurried form of writing, as if the writer didn’t want to spend the energy to write an actual sentence with flow and style, carrying the reader on to the next sentence, and the next. (By now some of you are probably un-following me, but oh well.)

One-word sentences stop me dead and take me completely out of the story. Maybe it’s just me, just a complaint by an older writer who can’t cope with change (partly true), but is this a good change? Literary pundits (who are adults) insist that young readers have no attention span, that they text so much that they prefer short, apparently one-word sentences. I would hope that we adults aren’t the only ones deciding what children prefer to read, or what they are capable of comprehending. Maybe they should have more of a voice in those decisions; they may know better. Because if they are offered less, how will they know that they can comprehend more? After all, we all read fairly complex sentences when we were young. I’d like to believe that humanity is getting smarter, not the opposite.

As a little sidebar, pundits also insist that youngsters don’t like or read description. I would hope that not all young readers are like that, because I think they will miss out on much imaginative story-telling, much lyrical description that nudges them to fill in the unwritten gaps and allow their minds to work and grow while they read. Young minds are the most malleable, the minds that grow the most; these are the minds that will take care of the world when they are older. (Notice I didn’t say “when they grow up.”)

End. Rant. Keep. On. Reading. (See how obnoxious it is??)