Ahh he yelled as he slashed him his blood hit the floor
Mark Moore a.k.a. Tuxedo Mark writes some of the most boring fanfics imaginable. Here's an example that's sometimes nicknamed "Linda! Laundry!"
She got a plastic box off of the shelf in the closet and opened it. She put the comforter into the box and closed the box. She put the box back on the shelf in the closet. Linda put fresh sheets on the bed. She put the old sheets in the laundry basket.
Reads like fiction written by a computer, once offered in The Book of Lists II.
Daughter of Niënor: "Only a few months later, the sons of Fëanor came and my world was again destroyed. This time, it was less scary and more sad and annoying, like I was getting used to it."
“You foal! Why did you capture Liara? She’s just a background pony so Twillight will not care if I kill her.” screamed Celesia and started to kill the guard. “No we captured the other lesbian called Rainbow Dash. The one who’s part of the harmony elements.” said the almost death guard. “Oh that are very good news so I’m not killing you.” said Celesia and stopped killing the guard. “Thanks my Queen.” said the guard and left the room and lived happily even after.
Isaac Asimov is well known for this. A tendency that he pokes fun at later in Gold, where a bunch of frustrated film writers desparately try to cobble together a screen adaptation of an Asimov story (The Gods Themselves), cursing Asimov's dialogue-laden, non-descriptive, and beige prose the entire way.
Ernest Hemingway is known for his simple writing style that lacks flowery language and keeps descriptions to a minimum. He called it "the theory of omission" or "The Iceberg Principle." While some authors criticized him for it, his style is widely considered to be very effective. Hemingway himself attributed his terse style to his training as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Because he had to communicate from Europe to North America by the expensive medium of cable, it was naturally expected that he should compose his reports to be as succinct as possible while including all the story's salient information.
Albert Camus' The Stranger. Done to ape Hemingway, and Meursault is supposed to be emotionally detached.
Michael A. Stackpole. Greatideas. Plain description.
Aaron Allston, from the same series, is completely different. The shift is a bit shocking, moreso when it switches back.
Parts of The Bible, especially Leviticus. Major stories and incidents, including Sodom & Gomorrah and the Tower of Babel, are dispensed and dismissed in 3-4 verses. The creation of man is summed up in a page. One time in the Bible, someone saves all the Israelites, equaling what Moses did earlier. This is told in two paragraphs.
Terrance Dicks's novelisations of Doctor Who. Can be forgiven, since he was doing many, but it made them dull to read. His original novels can be better.
Cash's sections in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. First section is a list of what to do to properly construct Addie's casket. Next two sections, the third being 1 1/2 sentences long, are about the casket's imbalance.
Victor Hugo sent a letter to his publisher about Les Misérables sales. The text: "?" The reply: "!"
According to Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest correspondence ever.
"Such brevity is all the more remarkable when one considers that Les Misérables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language — 823 words without a period." Felton and Fowler's Best, Worst, and Most Unusual, p. 26
Charles Bukowski tells you only what you need to know. Very rarely uses multisyllabic words. The times when he breaks those rules are powerful.
Candide, by Voltaire. 1,000 page epic, shrunk into 75 pages. Very few details. Quickly advancing.
James Ellroy. Early works aren't too bad, but White Jazz and Blood's A Rover and after? Every. Sentence. Is. Like. This. Brevity is one thing, but what about bookisms? When told White Jazz overran its intended length, he took out everything that wasn't Beige Prose. Made it short enough but hard to read.
Shortest Science Fiction Story: "Time stopped. Yesterday" by David Gerrold. Shortest short story ever?
Everything by Cormac McCarthy. His books, Blood Meridian in particular, switch between this and purple prose.
"Knock" by Fredric Brown is an expansion of a 17-word horror story: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door." An alternate version ends with: "There was a lock on the door."
Tao Te Ching, the text of taoism. One hundred pages in book form. Even shorter in the original Chinese. Spoken, modern speakers don't grasp it: the homophones.
Also notable for not simply for using Beige Prose, but also advocating its usage:
"True words aren't eloquent; eloquent words aren't true."
This leads to several instances where the text would really have flowed better if the sentences were joined together. Instead, almost every sentence starts with "and", and almost all of them are short.
This is, of course, done on purpose as the narrator, Christopher, is autistic and so writes his account in a very logical manner avoiding metaphors and such which he considers to be 'lying'.
Luis Sepúlveda, faithful follower of Hemingway.
Ronald Syme wrote The Roman Revolution like this: a book on the Republic's fall and the Empire's rise.note Roman, not another Syme was writing like Tacitus.
In the words of my Roman History Professor: "Syme wrote in an abrupt, punchy style, writing sentences without verbs, or nouns, or sometimes even words."
Much of The Hunger Games series (the last two books in particular) are written with this. This is probably where the joke about the books being written entirely in sentence fragments comes from.
Humorist Will Stanton would often lapse into terse sentence fragments in his written works. Still very funny.
Screen Wipe once did an hour special on writers. One of them was famed for writing realistic dialogue on Eastenders, his method was to write the sentence and then cut down any unnecessary words. So "See you later, we must do this again some time" would after a series of cuts simply become "Later".
Music
Jon Lajoie's "I Kill People" rap is written this way to lay bare common rap subjects. Sample lyrics:
I buy a lot of expensive things, because I have a lot of money You can't afford expensive things 'cause you don't have a lot of money Ha ha, you want these things, but you cannot afford them That means that you're not cool 'cause you're just a poor person
The Minutemen's "Take 5, D":
Tub has to be properly caulked prior to any showering Walls are drenched Both roofer and plumber here Had to pay for two service calls
Lyrics taken straight from a landlady's note about a leaky bathtub. D. Boon thought Mike Watt's old lyrics for the song were "too spacey". He changed them to something mundane.
The title to track to The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. The lyrics are sparse, spoken instead of sung, and are mostly bare description. "Eraser," from the same album, could count as well - it only has a few lines, all two words long with just a verb and a noun (either "you" or "me").
The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.
This Is Just To Say I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold
Epigrams, the Greek ones however could be a lot longer and almost indistinguishable from elegies. Modern ones are only a couple of lines long. The most famous one was written by a Roman named Catullus.
Sten in Dragon Age: Origins, to the point of annoying the player who wants more information.
The summon spirit Shadow of theTales Series talks like this, with sentences rarely going over 3 words. The party in Tales of Phantasia have fun imitating his speech style during a skit, while Sheenalampshades it.
The SCP Foundation's files are written in a plain, clinical tone. It's very effective.
Western Animation
This is the entire shtick of "Blac-U" Weather forecaster Ollie Williams, from Family Guy. The man gets his weather forecasting across with this, and a combination of No Indoor Voice.
Tom Tucker: We now go to Ollie Williams, for the "Blac-U" weather report. Ollie?
Ollie:IS' GON' RAIN!
Tom Tucker: Thanks Ollie.
Stan Smith lapsed into a similar pattern when he tried to get back on the dating scene.
Subverted with the rise of smartphones, which allow you to type sentences as long and as fluently as you want to.
Most still don't.
Newsprint article titles, news copy in general.
Low-word-count English reports.
Manuals, memos.
Dr. Nakamats speech upon getting the Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition:
"Life should be lived long. Speech should be short!"
The Spartans, whose simplicity of speech gave rise to the word "laconic," after their dialect of Greek.
When Philip II of Macedon threatened them with the message: "If we enter Sparta, we will raze all your buildings and ravage all your women," Sparta sent back the answer, "If." Philip, as well as his son Alexander, left Sparta alone.
Party Guest: Mister Vice-President, I bet my friends over there I could get you to say three words tonight. Coolidge: You lose. (he leaves the party)
Some versions of the story have the party guest being Dorothy Parker.
Another example:
After church one Sunday, notoriously terse Calvin Coolidge was asked what the preacher had talked about. "Sin", replied Coolidge. "What did he say about it?" "He's against it."
The artificial language Toki Pona based on Taoist philosophy of the virtue of simple thought, life, and communication. It takes this to pretty extreme levels - for example, "pona", the word for "good", is intentionally designed to also mean "simple", and "ike" for "bad" or "evil" intentionally also means "complicated".
Guy Steele once gave a talk on computer language design, "Growing A Language", in which he restricted himself to using English words of one syllable, and allowed himself to use longer words only when he defined them first.
