Wednesday, November 24, 2004

WHY I LIKE COMMAS

There's this one scene in the Richard Price novel FREEDOMLAND where there's a mob or a protest or something in an apartment somewhere in Jersey, and the person in charge is either trying to control the crowd or scare the crowd, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to amplify the sound, and he starts saying something like: "The police, are on, the way. You have, to stay, calm." And that replicated so perfectly the way that people talk in those situations when you have a lot of loud people saying a lot of things and you want to be heard, have to be heard: the staggered, staccato monotone, the jagged breakdown of a sentence into easily heard and identifable parts, and I'd never seen it put in print like that, and I thought cool, which is why I've remembered the style, if not the exact wording, of it even five years after reading the book (which you should read, by the way.)

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