Use grammar for impact

Like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight into a hot beam, tight writing concentrates meaning.
 

Short elements are pithy and punchy. Alternating short and long elements creates rhythm and emphasis. Managing the zig and zag is an opportunity for writers.   
 

One tactic involves repeating a grammatical pattern that is condensed in iterations. In this example, a magazine writer creates a parallel pattern to describe how Harry Hopman, a famed tennis coach of Australian Davis Cup teams of the 1950s, would have dealt with modern players. Note how he sets a pattern in the second sentence that is continued in the third with increasing contraction:  
 

                  On court and off, if you played for Harry Hopman, you were held to the

                  highest standard of sportsmanship and behavior. A player muttering “Bloody

                  bad call” under his breath might, under Hopman, be sent home. Jimmy

                  Connors, playing for Hopman, would have been sent to prison, John 

                  McEnroe put to death.
                                                                                      Joseph Epstein, "Playing Like a Pro," 

                                                                                       Tennis Magazine, March 2012
 

Notice the similarity of the second and third sentences, which operate like a pair of examples. The first refers to players of Hopman’s time and the second to modern players. Both have some words set aside with commas – under Hopman and playing for Hopman. But in the last sentence the pace is quickened by omitting the connector and as well as the words would have been from the portion about John McEnroe:
 

                  Jimmy Connors, playing for Hopman, would have been sent to prison, John

                  McEnroe put to death.
 

In full form, the sentence would seem ponderous by comparison:
 

                  If Jimmy Connors had played for Hopman, he would have been sent to

                  prison, and John McEnroe would have been put to death.
 

The writer’s shorthand in the original sentence works particularly well – it reflects the quickness of Hopman’s response to players who did not meet his rules.
 

In the same way, the next example doesn’t need to repeat the verb got in each succeeding clause once the pattern has been set:
 

                  Everyone got something from the divorce: the husband a new wife, the wife

                  a new house, the daughter a new school, and all unhappiness.
 

What is the effect of such abbreviations? Sometimes sharp or biting; often ironic and informal:
 

                 The average person thinks he isn’t.

                 Everyone’s friend is no one’s.
 

                 Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because they

                 have to say something.
 

Irish dramatist G.B. Shaw used the style often, a good fit for his razor wit:
 

                  He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
 

                  One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who

                  haven’t and don’t.
 

Omit Connectors
Not only words within grammatical patterns can be removed but also the words that join grammatical elements, i.e., conjunctions like and and but. In this example, the writer omits and where we would expect to see it before dashed, reinforcing the sense of haste:
 

                  She rushed up the stairs, flew to the medicine cabinet, seized the antidote,

                  dashed back downstairs.
 

In the next example, note how the short sentences are missing the and that would typically combine them into one longer sentence. The omission underlines the sense of dogged repetition.
 

                  He sawed. He hammered. He ate bologna sandwiches. He worked till

                  his hands bled.
 

To emphasize contrast, writers can omit conjunctions between parallel elements:
 

                 She talked, we listened.
 

                 The legislation failed those who needed help, enriched those who needed no

                 help, ignored those with no voice.
 

When omitting words, writers sometimes punctuate a word string as a sentence even when they do not contain the subject noun and predicate necessary for a complete nucleus:
 

                  No pain, no gain.

                  The hell it is.

                  He crept silently. Eyes on the prey, hand on the trigger.
 

                 One for all and all for one.
 

Writing sentence fragments may violate a prohibition of your high school English teacher and absolutely violates the grammar checker in Word. But a computer’s grammar checker is woefully incapable of analyzing the infinite number of intelligible grammatical structures that our brains can create.  Ω     

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Related article  To add more punch to your writing, use sound and alliteration.