I kindly urge writers to use his subjective opinion here as an argument FOR rather than against the precision application of punctuation!
No. His (lack of) use of punctuation in his work is mesmerising and beautiful, and part of what made Blood Meridian one of the greatest novels of the last century.
Obviously that technique is less likely to be constructive in science writing.
The description of the Commanche attack near the beginning of the novel, where they suddenly appear out of nowhere and attack the soldiers has an amazing run-on sentence: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328033-a-legion-of-horrible...
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
Anyway, I am on another McMurtry kick since the new year that began rereading Texasville and then a first reading of Custer…For me, McMurtry is a triple threat of fiction, nonfiction, and essays: I enjoy everything he wrote.
Do you not see the irony in his own use of four commas and a colon while telling us to minimize our punctuation use in this article?
> While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
Perhaps he merely considered the "Oxford comma" unnecessary!
I focused on reading "Cormac McCarthy's tips" and missed that they'd been regurgitated by others. Sort of diminishes the whole point of reading it!
Thank you!
I am used to reading text with punctuation marks. When I enjoy a book, I forget that I am reading words on a page, and it feels like I'm seeing the story play out in my mind. The syntax of The Road constantly took me out of that feeling. It served only to remind me that I was reading a book by a dude who thinks adhering to the conventions of written English is beneath him.
The book was fine. I would have liked it a little more if it was punctuated normally, but of course, different strokes for different folks.
I would compare it to adjective order. You might say that the Goodyear Blimp is a big old blue polyester balloon. Never that it's a polyester old blue big balloon. It sounds wrong the second way. If I were a novelist searching for a gimmick, I could intentionally disregard standard adjective order and arrange the adjectives in another order every time I described something. It would give my writing a unique flavor. But it wouldn't make me any more descriptive, just annoying to read, because every time you hit a description your brain would throw an exception and then catch it going "oh, he's doing this again..."
That cognitive interruption, which I've kindly added multiple times to my first paragraph, is precisely what McCarthy says not to do in the very first bullet point of the article:
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can."
Neither McCarthy nor anyone else in this conversation is referring to the punctuation at the end of a sentence.
And, for the record, I was exclaiming that the takeaway is exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. That is, in fact, the precise meaning of an exclamation point.
I've kindly included some actual cognitive interruptions for you, to aid in your understanding of this discussion.
Until, after giving my copy to my brother, he had the same response as you. At the time, twenty five years ago, I was surprised but now I accept everything isn’t for everyone and hence all books are not for all readers.
My brother and I had different reading experiences and developed different tastes. I couldn’t get through the Carl Hiassen paperback I got in exchange. There wasn’t anything I cared about there.
“Properly punctuated” is not a blurb to captivate my attention. YMMV.