Subject: (urth) TWK: Able's Prose Style

From: Mike Sakasegawa <saxon75 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 23:25:01 +0000

Hello all. I'm relatively new to the list--I posted briefly as Hitsuji a
couple of years ago and then dropped out. Anyway, I recently finished
reading The Wizard and had a question.

As far as I noticed, Arthur never once uses a contraction in the prose
portions of his letter to Ben. It seemed odd to me, because his dialogue
uses as many contractions as you would normally see in a 20th century
American teenager's speech, but I was unable to spot a single instance of a
contraction in the prose. I was wondering if anyone thought there was any
significance to that.

-Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20051104/01cd1fc6/attachment.htm

---

From: Bob Miller <bob_bageera at hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2005 02:42:46 +0000

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20051105/2cefe6ff/attachment.htm

---

From: Mike Sakasegawa <saxon75 at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:43:28 +0000

Contractions are a perfectly legitimate grammatical construction, and
given the first person perspective and the characterization evident in
the narration, it struck me as odd that there were no contractions to
be found.  Since it stood out to me so much in TWK, I feel like I
would have noticed if they had also been absent from the other Wolfe
works that I've read, but I don't recall that being the case.  I'll
investigate further when I get the chance.

-Mike

On 11/5/05, Bob Miller wrote:
>
> That comment about the lack of contractions is probably apropos now, MIke.  All it really means is that GEne Wolfe is not an incompetent writer or does not deliberately use bad grammar.  <chuckle>  I well remember being dropped from an A to a C in an inclass essay because I used a couple contractions.  My ego still smarts from the ruler to it.
>
> Bob