When I read The Road I found the lack of punctuation distracting rather than mesmerizing. I was using an e-reader and my initial thought was, "Is this right? Ma

When I read The Road I found the lack of punctuation distracting rather than mesmerizing. I was using an e-reader and my initial thought was, "Is this right? Maybe they OCRed this and only glanced at the output." I had heard that the book was good from a few different sources, but none mentioned the unusual style. I Googled it to find out that this was, in fact, how it was supposed to be, and continued. I am used to reading text with punctuation marks. When I enjoy a book, I forget that I am reading words on a page, and it feels like I'm seeing the story play out in my mind. The syntax of The Road constantly took me out of that feeling. It served only to remind me that I was reading a book by a dude who thinks adhering to the conventions of written English is beneath him. The book was fine. I would have liked it a little more if it was punctuated normally, but of course, different strokes for different folks. I would compare it to adjective order. You might say that the Goodyear Blimp is a big old blue polyester balloon. Never that it's a polyester old blue big balloon. It sounds wrong the second way. If I were a novelist searching for a gimmick, I could intentionally disregard standard adjective order and arrange the adjectives in another order every time I described something. It would give my writing a unique flavor. But it wouldn't make me any more descriptive, just annoying to read, because every time you hit a description your brain would throw an exception and then catch it going "oh, he's doing this again..."