The Globs
Aug.16, 2009 in
Competition
They’re coming in on big waves in high tide, translucent, bubble-shaped, seemingly inert,
clinging to ice plant, debris, litter, on the backs of other sea life, scurrying in the sand, burying themselves deep, nourished on sand life, hydrated on salt water absorbed through porous membranes.
Poisonous to touch, impossible to destroy, emerging as the new life, the new species from mother water, arriving simultaneously on seven continents.
This post was submitted by Jean Blasiar.
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May 12th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
This is my first time on this site, so I don’t know if this is a standard example or not. But that’s a major run-on sentence with too many clauses, and I think that’s cheating.
Plus, it would read better with some corrections:
They’re coming in on big waves in (should be AT, not in) high tide, (: colon, not comma) translucent, bubble-shaped, seemingly inert,(;)
clinging to ice plant(s), debris, litter, on the backs of other sea life,(;) scurrying in the sand, burying themselves deep,(;) nourished on sand life, hydrated on salt water absorbed through porous membranes.
Poisonous to (THE) touch, impossible to destroy,(;) emerging as the new life, the new species from mother water, (and) arriving simultaneously on seven continents.
The ; semi-colons would make it grammatically correct, but every time I used a semi-colon, I would recommend those clauses as alternate sentence subjects. That’s a lot of additional sentences, thereby invalidating the “two sentence” requirement. Thus, I call this cheating. I shall have to see if I can do better.
The Cloaked Stranger’s last blog post..Note from the Author
May 13th, 2009 at 1:16 am
I’m often split on the subject of the poor semi-colon. One the on hand we have a grammatical device which has a clear reason for existence and therefore it should be used. On the other … people don’t use semi-colons. I generally take the position that language is a living malleable thing and therefore whatever the majority of people do is ultimately correct. Sadly, I think the semi-colon is an endangered species.
For example, I once had an argument with another editor who insisted email be written e-mail. I argued for evolution of language and the removal of hyphens in commonly used words. She argued for the rules.
Another example is “would have” versus “would of”. Would of is incorrect yet this is used by many people. How do we decide that would of is now acceptable? When it appears on 500,000 websites perhaps?
For this story, I don’t mind “in high tide” instead of “at high tide”. I’d replace “in” with “at” because there are two “in” so close together. As for “ice plant” I read it the same way as “fish” or “sheep” where the singular and the plural are the same.
The imagery of this story is so compelling that it drowns out the tiny editor voice muttering something about semi-colons.
Good edit Cloaked Stranger!