And is it not true that the painfully involved and boresome style of Henry James—the adjectival and adverbial style, the style of endless qualifications, the assertion and amplification of the “ego” style—is rapidly becoming obsolete in fiction as it has long been obsolete in American journalism?
And is it not true that the terse, the substantive, the journalistic style, together with the printed page in many colors and many types, is gaining vogue?
In even the matter of punctuation the painstaking use of the comma and the semicolon has yielded to the free use of the dash. Only a short time ago there appeared a lamentation by a well-known writer over the use of the dash in dialogue. He counted an unbelievable number on one page of a popular magazine, each of which, he thought, should have been replaced by one of the more orthodox signs.
But the orthodox signs are too slow. Modern conversation does not move in studied phrases and rounded periods; its sign is the dash, because the dash either breaks the thought abruptly or carries it over into the words of the next speaker.
Furthermore, before leaving the subject, it should be
VAN REES
Maternity