Why Coherence is Important

Taken from The Book Bench: Worst College Essays 1989:

"Nicholson has become a chomping-machine of language, recycling stock phrases, appropriating whatever drifts into his path. His words are nothing but echoes; but, as André Topia writes of the nameless narrator of the “Cyclops” chapter in “Ulysses,” the words are struck from a matrix, an idiom of the voice which destroys and sublates their origin. In “Ulysses” and in “The Shining” there is “this phenomenon of near possession which makes the Nameless One, though re-saying the already-said, seem to be bringing it into existence for the first time. He becomes its origin and founder.” The text is the absurd writing of one determined to write all the same, to produce text, to sign whatever texts come his way. Each line of text bears his own signature, “Jack”; he writes to saturate the void with his own subjectivity. But this “writing project” does not cheerfully consume the boundary between text and play. It is hermetic, a pure and rather fragile exertion of writerly will which is shattered by the intrusions of its only reader, the woman named Wendy. Jack would have been content to type for ever and ever and ever. But the spell is broken, and he stalks way. In the Gold Room, the fatally disconnected under-zone of play, he finds a fin-de-siècle soirée in progress; after a drink of Jack Daniels, he dances about for a bit—if you will, a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/worst-college-essays-1989.html#ixzz1bFJm1pep

The article talks about a writing trend of "incomprehensible pseudo-Derridean gobbledygook" that swept through colleges in the late 80's. This hits on a point I don't think was mentioned in Style. Although this paragraph obviously lacks coherence, it does it on purpose. Great writers can and usually do disregard a lot of the "rules" of writing as presented in style. The difference between them and college students like me is that they're just that: great writers. They can do so because they've already mastered the rules. After I read A Farewell to Arms I was trying to using the Hemingway run-on, punch sentence combo all over the place. This included places where I shouldn't have like religion essays and biology test questions. Although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and by mimicking and playing with the decadent prose of a favorite author with its flowing phrases and alliterative cadence every once in a while you may create a masterpiece sentence fit to appear in a Hemingway novel full of emotion and expression extolling the very feelings you wish to express. Or maybe else you won't.

(See what I did there?)