Definition and Examples of Crots in Composition

In composition, a crot is a verbal bit or fragment used as an autonomous unit to create an effect of abruptness and rapid transition. Also called a blip. In  An Alternate Style: Options in Composition  (1980), Winston Weathers described crot  as an archaic word for bit or fragment. The term, he said, was revived by  American essayist and novelist  Tom Wolfe in his introduction to  The Secret Life of Our Times  (Doubleday, 1973). This is one of the few great ways that a fragment sentence can be used effectively — they are often used in poetry but can be used in other forms of literature as well. Examples and Observations in Literature New Years Eve on Broadway. 1931. The poets dream. The bootleggers heaven. The hat check girls julep of joy. Lights. Love. Laughter. Tickets. Taxis. Tears. Bad booze putting hics into hicks and bills into tills. Sadness. Gladness. Madness. New Years Eve on Broadway.(Mark Hellinger, New Years Eve on Broadway. Moon Over Broadway, 1931)The Crots of Mr. JingleAh! fine place, said the stranger, glorious pile — frowning walls — tottering arches — dark nooks — crumbling staircases — Old cathedral too — earthy smell — pilgrims feet worn away the old steps — little Saxon doors — confessionals like money-takers boxes at theatres — queer customers those monks — Popes, and Lord Treasurers, and all sorts of old fellows, with great red faces, and broken noses, turning up every day — buff jerkins too — matchlocks — Sarcophagus — fine place — old legends too — strange stories: capita l and the stranger continued to soliloquize until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High Street, where the coach stopped.(Alfred Jingle in Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837)Coetzees CrotsWhat absorbs them is power and the stupor of power. Eating and talking, munching lives, belching. Slow, heavy-bellied talk. Sitting in a circle, debating ponderously, issuing degrees like hammer blows: death, death, death. Untroubled by the stench. Heavy eyelids, piggish eyes, shrewd with the shrewdness of generations of peasants. Plotting against each other too: slow peasant plots that take decades to mature. The new Africans, pot-bellied, heavy-jowled men on their stools of office: Cetshwayo, Dingane in white skins. Pressing downward: their power in their weight.(J.M. Coetzee, The Age of Iron, 1990)Crots in PoetryAh to be aliveon a mid-September mornfording a streambarefoot, pants rolled up,holding boots, pack on,sunshine, ice in the shallows,northern rockies.(Gary Snyder, For All)Crots i n AdvertisingTell England. Tell the world. Eat more Oats.  Take Care of your Complexion. No More War. Shine your Shoes with Shino. Ask your Grocer. Children love Laxamalt.  Prepare to meet thy God. Bungs Beer is Better. Try Dogsbodys Sausages. Whoosh the Dust Away. Give them Crunchlets. Snagsburys Soups are Best for the Troops.  Morning Star, best Paper by Far. Vote for Punkin and Protect your Profits. Stop that Sneeze with Snuffo. Flush your Kidneys with Fizzlets. Flush your Drains with Sanfect. Wear Wool-fleece next the Skin. Popps Pills Pep you Up. Whiffle your Way to Fortune. . . .Advertise, or go under.(Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 1933)Menckens CrotsTwenty million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio; it takes four days hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next day a dam must be opened somewhere. Four senators get drunk and try to neck a lady politician built like an overloaded tramp steamer. The Presidential autom obile runs over a dog. It rains.(H.L. Mencken, Imperial Purple)Updikes CrotsFootprints around a KEEP OFF sign.Two pigeons feeding each other.Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.A plump old man saying Chick, chick and feeding peanuts to squirrels.Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore.(John Updike, Central Park)Winston Weathers and Tom Wolfe on Crots- In its most intense form, the crot is characterized by a certain abruptness in its termination. As each crot breaks off, Tom Wolfe says, it tends to make ones mind search for some point that must have just been made—presque vu!—almost seen! In the hands of a writer who really understands the device, it will have you making crazy leap s of logic, leaps you never dreamed of before.The provenance of the crot may well be in the writers note itself--in the research note, in the sentence or two one jots down to record a moment or an idea or to describe a person or place. The crot is essentially the note left free of verbal ties with other surrounding notes. . . .The general idea of unrelatedness present in crot writing suggests correspondence—for those who seek it—with the fragmentation and even egalitarianism of contemporary experience, wherein the events personalities, places of life have no particular superior or inferior status to dictate priorities of presentation.(Winston Weathers, An Alternate Style: Options in Composition. Boynton/Cook, 1980)Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerina Knight slippers.(Tom Wolfe, The Gir l of the Year. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965)MontagePart of the power of moving images comes from the technique [Sergei] Eisenstein championed: montage. Here the tables turn in the contest between the novel and moving images, for in switching rapidly between perspectives, it is those who share their imaginations with us by writing who are at a disadvantage.Because writers must work to make each view they present believable, it is very difficult for them to present a rapid series of such views. Dickens, with his marvelous alertness, succeeds as well as any writer has: the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squealing of pigs; the cries of the hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides [Oliver Twist]. But when attempting to capture the energy and chaos of this stunning and bewildering market-morning scene, Dickens is often reduced to lists: Countrymen, drovers, bu tchers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade or crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling.(Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. Oxford University Press, 1998) See also: Collage EssayIn Defense of Fragments,  Crots, and Verbless SentencesListMinor SentenceSentence FragmentSuite Amà ©ricaine, by H.L. MenckenUsing Sentence Fragments EffectivelyVerbless SentenceWhat Is a Sentence?