The Art of the Sentence Fragment

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” I love that sentence. Well, it’s not really a sentence. There’s no verb. It’s what’s known as a sentence fragment. “Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” It’s from John McPhee’s great Looking for a Ship (1990). It’s like an entry in a journal or log book. But it also has the compression and vividness of poetry. What does it mean? For that you need the context in which the fragment is embedded. Here it is:

The four-to-eight ends. The four-to-eight begins. Four A. M. in the cashmere blackness. We have entered Columbian water. 

The fragment embodies a particular moment in time. McPhee is on the bridge of the S.S. Stella Lykes with his friend Andy Chase as they enter Columbian water. “Cashmere blackness” brilliantly evokes the warmth of the tropical air and the darkness of the night.

McPhee uses a similar fragmentary construct in “Coal Train” (The New Yorker, October 3 & 10, 2005): “Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.”  I love it. Here’s the context:

Traced from a map, the Coal Line has the receme structure of a bluebell or a lily of the valley, as dainty an image as nature can provide for a stem whose flowers are coal mines. Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.

The juxtaposition of those two sentences is surprising and delightful – the lyricism of “bluebell and “lily of the valley” shattered by the brute reality of “Black Thunder Junction.” 

Consider this exquisite passage from McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2007):

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Note the sequence of three sentence fragments: “The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer.” Each fragment is like a Cézanne brush stroke – quick touches, one following the other, intensifying the scene’s chalkiness. 

You see the same accretion of detail in this passage from McPhee’s “Land of the Diesel Bear” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2005):

After the interstates’ oceanic sameness, the silver tanker in those suburban streets was something like an anadromous fish coming out of the sea and going up a river, suddenly having to pick its way through narrow channels past bridge piers and over ledges up rapids past erratic boulders. Old Howarth Road, Oxford, Massachusetts. The groin vaulting of shade trees. The blind curves. The bouldery suburban houses. Dudley Road. Old Webster Road. The hunkered companies. International Photonics Group. Stop, start—stop sign to stop sign, light to light, the truck was kicking like a mule. 

Eight impressionistic sentence fragments, a montage of images that McPhee sees through the windshield of Ainsworth’s big diesel, as they pick their way through the suburbs. I find the eighth fragment particularly intriguing. It’s the name of a company – “International Photonics Group” – plucked from the countless commercial signs streaming by McPhee’s window. He uses it to evoke the suburban landscape he’s traveling in. Art is where you find it. 

For McPhee, the fragmentary sentence is just one implement in his extensive multi-drawer toolkit. For Iain Sinclair, it’s a defining element of his style. The opening paragraph of his magnum opus, London Orbital (2002), is typical of his approach:

It started with the Dome, the Millenium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

Here's another example from London Orbital – a paragraph made entirely of sentence fragments:

Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The. Border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.

Here's an example from Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (2011):

Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by sharp-angled Vorticist obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling into aggregate dunes, dark-shadowed lakes. Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb. Cattle, on strips of land between creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, in the soft haze, smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. 

That’s part of Sinclair’s description of what he sees as he walks a path along the Thames Estuary. Details accrete, one after another, building a picture. The buildup is the action. Some of the fragments are ugly (“Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire”); some are beautiful (“Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb”).  

Perhaps the most ingenious writer of fragmentary sentences is Robert Macfarlane. Here are a few samples from his superb The Old Ways (2012):

I walked up the avenue, skirted the earthworks of a large Iron Age ring-fort, crossed a road and then entered a wide meadow that rises to the top of a chalk down, whose summit floats 250 feet above sea level. Charcoal trees, a taste of pewter in the mouth.

I glanced back at the sea wall, but it was barely visible now through the haze. A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.

Mid-morning departure, Stornoway harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel. Broad Bay’s wake through the harbour – a tugged line through the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk.

The sun above us, bright and high, but the sky darkening swiftly further out. Black sky-reefs of cloud to the east. The sea: graphite, lightly choppy, white stippled. The wind: a near-southerly, Force 3 or 4, with just a touch of east in it.

A rainless gale rushing out of the east, deer tracks in moor mud, a black sky, gannets showing white as flares above the sea. Dawn on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis. Thin light, cold and watery. Burly clouds at 1,000 feet, the day forming from the dark.

On the mantelpiece and window ledges were dozens of found objects: bird’s eggs, bones, antlers and pebbles. A swan’s wishbone with no central join. A skua’s egg from the Shiants. A pure-white golden plover’s egg, fragile as a bubble. Dark-brown sea beans, floated in from the Caribbean, like little leathery kidneys. 

Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rock, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss.

Right beneath the north face, where the rock dropped 500 feet sheer to the moor, was a pool called the Dubh Loch – the Black Lake – by whose shore I rested. Tar-black water, emerald reeds in the shallows.

Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive? (2025), contains dozens of imagistic haiku-like sentence shards. For example: 

Spruce, pine, alder, rowan. Waxwings on the rowan.

A single star. A thin line of orange light to the east, smudged by rain. Three loons on the water, calling now and then. A strong northerly wind.

Bronze of the rivers, gold of the sandbanks, red-green sphagnum tapestry.

Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from the rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls.

Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness.

Scent of pine resin in the cool air.

Grey, greasy dawn. The rain has grudgingly stopped.

Hot sun. River glitter.

Long days of hot sun and hard work. Nights crisp, and the moon waned by a sliver each time. 

Sentence fragments are a form of short-hand used to paint word pictures. They convey immediacy and intensify vividness. In the hands of great writers like McPhee, Sinclair, and Macfarlane, they’re a concentrated miniature art form.

Credit: The above illustration is based on photos by Yolanda Whitman (John McPhee), Joy Gordon (Iain Sinclair), and Charlotte Hadden (Robert Macfarlane).