🥑 what you said

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If you’re new around here, welcome! You might have missed our last Bite, which came with a debate for the audience:

Should fiction authors use sentence fragments in their prose?

And it wasn’t a debate so much as a one-sided fragment-fest of affirmation. Common practice—and the lovely authors who follow Avocado Bites—agree that fragments have a right to exist.

Another point of agreement: that right comes with caveats. Here are some highlights from your responses.

To put it reductively: fiction is about feelings. We write to elicit emotional responses from our readers. Use the tools at your disposal (except for asking ChatGPT to “rewrite this with more heart” or whatever) to convey.

Short sentences (and short paragraphs) draw the eye. Sentence fragments stand out from their fully constructed fellows. They’re a stylistic choice—and an aesthetic one.

I didn’t miss the adjective “judiciously” in there; check out this response:

If you have more than two sentence fragments in a row, I recommend trying one or more of the following:

• Combine them into one sentence.

• Make one a full sentence.

• Make both a full sentence.

• Remove whichever one is more redundant for the paragraph’s purpose (e.g., repeating an idea you already conveyed).

Are any of these edits stronger than keeping the sentence fragments as they are? You don’t know until you try. This “audition” technique trains your brain to make the best choices for your prose—whether you keep the fragments or not.

I loved getting your feedback, so we’ll have more debates soon!

Next week: a new series on scene starters.

Want feedback on your own scene starters? Reply to this email with an opening line from one of your scenes and I may use it in a future Bite.

Thanks for reading Avocado Bites!

^{Avocado Bites is a publication of Avocado Tree Press, LLC, that helps you revise your stories one bite at a time. We love working with indie and traditionally published authors on fiction manuscripts—and if that’s you, welcome to our target audience.}

^{Ready for a sample edit? Here’s our site.}

^{Addison Horner is the chief editor of Avocado Tree Press. Here’s his newsletter. It’s different but still pretty good.}