Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
The fun part is that in some languages it seems to be perfectly all right (or even considered correct) to drop large parts from sentences, if those parts are considered to be obvious. For non-native speakers, that can be quite confusing.
If I remember correctly, Japanese is one of those languages.
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It is also correct in fiction when the character speaking/narrating would be expected to speak that way.
A novel where a street punk speaks in full grammatically correct sentences would at a minimum raise eyebrows.
Narrative writers have a lot more freedom than academic, business, or technical writers; they are very different forms of writing aimed at different kinds of communication. One seeks to convey moods and emotions as well as factual data while the other seeks clarity and precision. Both require mastery of the language but have different constraints and expectations. An emotionally charged business proposal might be cause for dismissal while a cold, emotionless precisionist novel had better be about robots or vulcans.
Way back when, my Plant Design professor had a running war with the english department because he wanted to teach a class on Technical Writing for engineers and they insisted all* writing instruction belonged to their grammarians.
The Professor responded by adjusting the format of our Plant Design Course, cutting out the reviews of component design that other professors started with and instead, the first day, he assigned us a project to research, develop, and *report* on for the full semester.
(He gave us two references: a paper on a chemical process and a book on technical writing.) Along the way he critiqued our technical report writing and taught engineering economics. We were expected to write weekly progress reports and at the end we delivered a business grade proposal evaluating the technical and economic merit of the proposed project. (My partner and I rejected the proposal as technically feasible but a marginal investment. There were better uses for investment funds.) Nobody could prove he was teaching technical writing, but the end result...
When I got to my first job all I needed was to take a look at one memo to figure out the preferred format; the boss was impressed.
