About a month ago, my wife Carolyn, a down-to-earth 35-year-old butch lesbian with a Master's degree in Library and Information Management, was reading her mail when I heard her murmur, "What the...?" I looked up and saw her examining an envelope quizzically. "Hmmm. It does seem to be addressed to me," she mused. "I can't imagine how I got on this list."

The list in question would be the potential subscribers' list for Jane Pratt's new publishing venture, Jane . When I asked Carolyn to elaborate on this piece of mail, she insisted on doing a dramatic reading of the text of the letter itself. We soon were both laughing so hard that I'm surprised our bladders didn't leak or intestines rip. The invitation to subscribe to this new magazine was so...breathless . Let me give a thankfully brief parody.

"You're not like the others. You know. You're you. Different. Better. Younger. More curious. More hip. More probing. You want to know more. Need to know more. About the newsmakers and deal-breakers. When they've been naughty. When they've been nice. Things the other magazines won't tell you. Well, Jane will. Jane the magazine and Jane the woman. She's you. When she's not her. Which she is. If you know what I mean. Which you don't. So subscribe now."

There were enough sentence fragments in the letter to tile a mosaic swimming pool. There were more periods in it than in King Solomon's harem, if you know what I mean. To read this prose style aloud is to inevitably slip into a rapid sotto voce whisper. Try it---you simply can't help it, you sound like Sarah Siddons urgently beckoning the stage manager, every time. The Jane letter is far from unique; it was merely the most egregious example we'd seen so far.

I know that since I was born before 1970, I am hopelessly square. I also know, as one who was an English major, that our language is fluid, everchanging, not only in the vocabulary but also in the syntax. I don't mean to decry as a major crisis what is only a natural and minor shift. But hey---come on! Write a complete sentence once in a while, hipsters! Kids, you don't look cool when you write two words and punctuate, then one more and punctuate again. You look stupid.

I think a modest example could be made by applying this newfangled prose style to a couple of older works. Shall we?

Let's try Chaucer: "Chauntecleer was a rooster. Not your average rooster. He was special. Different. Horny. He was headed for a comedown. A big comedown."

Fast forward to Toni Morrison: "Sethe was upset. Real upset. Her baby was making a racket. A big loud racket. Her baby was different. Special. Dead. But noisy."

Yeah, I see how whole sentences were just a needless embellishment for the "Tales" and for "Beloved." What a nutty bourgeois convention, eh? Let's free those periods from the tyranny of words.

Actually, I recently saw an ad in Rolling Stone for the CD-Rom Riven , which I played and loved and which, along with its precursor Myst , is one of the most inventive and original games/stories around. But egads!--the ad copy was atrocious. It very nearly DID free periods from the tyranny of words. It said something like, "You. Will. Be. Amazed." Oh. Really. You. Are. Right. I. Am. Amazed. Or. Appalled.

I have nothing personally against Jane Pratt. She's kind of cute, and I'm sure she's bright. I wish her continued success. However, I wish she'd do us a favor and EDIT that magazine she edits! I wish that, in an age when we all can get online and write whatever we want without having the content edited by others--a time for which I am profoundly grateful-- more of us would still edit ourselves for style. I'm not offering perfection nor demanding it. I'd just like to see a little readability. Prose is proliferating; it is powerful. It doesn't have to stink. Throw a few words into your prose now and then just to keep it interesting. Thank you!

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