Informal grammar and reading plays

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

Pip wrote:

> Full stop (period)? Long. Pause. Or the character has just 
> finished their line.

> Sentence. Does 'not' consist of subject, object, verb. Instead can 
> consist of absolutely anything you like. One word lines are fine. 

Funny.  I'd always thought those rules applied to prose fiction as 
well.  *And* to other types of informal writing.  Non-academic 
essays, for example.  Or, uh, well, you know.  Written chit-chat.

Huh.


Kathryn wrote:

> I used to hate reading plays at school. We rarely got to see them 
> actually performed and it's just not the same reading them. It's 
> no wonder so many people view Shakespeare as boring having been 
> made to read some of his plays at school. Plays should be 
> performed; books should be read. 

Oh, I always loved reading plays in school!  In fact, I still love
reading plays.  The big problem with reading plays as fiction, 
though, is that I find that when I finally get to see a performance 
of a play that I have read, I have problems enjoying it.  I tend to 
visualize plays while I read them, you see, much in the same way that 
I visualize fiction, and then when I finally do get to see a 
performance, it seems all "wrong."  The characters don't look the way 
I imagined them looking.  They don't deliver their lines the way I 
imagined them speaking.  I wind up having the exact same problem that 
I often have enjoying movie adaptations of books that I have read.

I have tried to combat this problem by reminding myself whenever I
read a play that it is a *play,* that it was written to be 
*performed,* that it is not really meant to stand on its own as a 
piece of written fiction, and so forth.

But it only sometimes works.

Elkins