"No rule says that written English has to use the same word order as spoken English, or that writers can’t play around. But a writer who introduces awkwardness should have a reason."
Says David Owen, in "The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve/A semi-attentive investigation into a confounding sentence type" (The New Yorker).
He actually is stating a rule. It's just a very general rule and it has a very general exception. He just can't force writers to follow that rule, and he's written a long article railing against one very particular type of variation from natural spoken-English word order:
[P]eople nowadays seem more likely than ever to begin sentences with appositives or similarly irritating clauses or phrases—as in this triple punch, from the Washington Post...
A husband of 28-years, now he was a widower. A father of two college-age boys, one was dead while the other was recovering from his own gunshot wound. A man of faith, he was burning at God for letting tragedy strike.
A century or so ago, as near as I can tell, no one wrote like that. Then something happened. What?
It doesn't so much matter why it happened — it seems to have begun as a way to insert additional information into newspaper articles. What matters is noticing when you're doing it and cutting it out.
Reading about Owen's pet peeve, I run into my pet peeve, the word "garner":
The other day, as a test, I picked up the top book on a pile of mysteries that my wife was about to return to the library—“Entry Island,” by Peter May—and found one after flipping through it for a minute or two: “A lonely boy trapped in the body of a man, Norman had only found company in a world he created himself on his ceiling.” There’s one in the author’s bio, too: “One of Scotland’s most prolific television dramatists, May garnered more than 1,000 credits over a decade and a half spent as scriptwriter and editor on primetime British television.”
It's not Owen writing "garner," though. It's May (or whoever wrote May's bio). He hit Owen's pet peeve and mine in the same damned sentence.
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