Henry is trying to capture that feel of telling a story orally, he also throws in plenty of addresses to his audience of listeners, as in, 'Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends – a mammoth task' (20). If you get caught on a particular sentence it might make you lose the thread of the whole story. Since when you're listening to a story you can't go back and read a sentence again, it's important that you don't get lost. It also prevents them from getting lost in overly long sentences. This style keeps listeners hanging on from one sentence to the next. It's typical of the ways we tell stories when we speak. This technique has a way of weaving together the story across individual sentences and gives it a flow that would be broken apart by writing in more complete, self-contained sentences. Henry sound conversational.) Looking at those first two sentences clues us in on how the story's style tends to operate as a whole: lots of short sentences that often depend on other sentences in order to work. ( And if you look, you'll notice that Shmoop does this sometimes too – it's part of what makes us and O. Likewise, the narrator is fond of starting sentences with words that grammar sticklers would say you're not supposed to start with, like 'And' or 'Which.' This also has the effect of making one sentence hinge on the sentence before. Although the second sentence at least has a verb, it's also technically not a complete sentence: the subject, 'that,' is unspecified, and only makes sense given the previous sentence. We get that information in the next sentence: 'That was all' (1). We need more information about what that sum of money 'means' or 'does' in order to understand the sentence. There's no verb or action in that sentence it just states a sum of money. There are lots of sentences that aren't really sentences, like the opening one: 'One dollar and eighty-seven cents' (1). Henry achieve this effect? Basically he breaks grammar rules. The story is narrated as if someone were telling it to you aloud. Oral, Simple, Informal (and spun together from incomplete sentences)

O henry the gift of the magi 1905