| > ] Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball. > ] The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated. > Is the second so much easier to read? The second one is semantically different. In the first sentence, it is pervasive information, from an omnipresent narrator who can peer into the minds of characters, that the mother is irritated. In the second sequence, the mother sounds irritated: the narrative voice doesn't look inside the mind, but only reports on the external evidence. In the first sentence, the girl doesn't just go inside; we know that she runs. She also runs to her mother. In the second sequence, she goes inside, not necessarily to her mother. There is a sense in the first sentence that the girl might know that her mother is irritated before running inside. There is a sense in the second sequence that the girl learns, together with the reader, that her mother is irritated, only after going inside. |
no, only that she sounds irritated, we have to assume there was information we were not party to that the girl was.