A fragment sentence is basically just an
incomplete sentence. It's missing
something: it may be a subject; it may be a
verb. Whatever it is, a fragment
sentence is an incomplete sentence. You
might be thinking, "well, that's all I need
to know. Now I can spot them and I should
be fine." But if we left it there, we
wouldn't have any tips or strategies for
being able to detect them in our own
writing.
So in what follows, I'm just going to review
four specific strategies that you can use
to spot fragment sentences.
The first of these is to read your work
aloud, which may seem like a lot of
work, and sometimes it is. You don't have to
read everything aloud. But if you're
not sure, then read a sentence aloud and
see if it sounds okay and complete. The
second strategy is to avoid or ignore
context. And by context we mean the
sentences around the one that you're
trying to analyze. In the first example,
for instance, if we were trying to figure
out if the second sentence is complete,
we would ignore the first one. We cannot
use the grammar or the syntax of the
first one and carry it over to the second
one. And in fact that's one of the most
common reasons why people use fragments
is that they have taken the syntax, and
they're still thinking about the same
ideas, and then they forget that that
next sentence has to be complete by
itself. So those are two general
strategies for avoiding fragments. We can
also (and now we're going to get more
specific here) we can also watch out
for present participles.
Watch out for present participles. And
present participles end in "ing," so they
are verbs that end in "ing." And when they
do, they're no longer considered verbs
but they're considered verbals. So
there's a number of verbals out there,
and
the present participle is one of them. If you
look at the first example then, as we
read the second sentence it goes,
"Describing the initiation of converts to
the worship of the devil,
although we do not know for sure whether
it is just a dream." As you look at this
more closely, you can see that "describing"
here ends in "ing." It's a present
participle. And we've started with this kind
of acting as if this is our main verb.
But there's no subject in the sentence
for describing. Who is describing?
What is describing? Well it's actually the
story that's describing the initiation
of converts. So what we've done then is
we have violated our second rule in a
sense. We've not ignored the context.
Instead, we have taken the subject from
the one sentence and we're still using
it in the second one as if that
somehow works. So really watch out for
that--that you don't take over the
grammar from one sentence and just
import it into the next one. Every
sentence has to have a subject and a
verb all by itself.
The other thing about present
participles that we want to remember is
that they can be the main verb, but only
if they have a helping verb with them. So
a helping verb would be something like "is,"
"was," and so on. And then we can use that
to create a verb phrase. So we can say, "he
is describing," "Sarah was
describing," something like that, and we
have a subject and a verb. But if we
don't have that, if we just have the
present participle by itself, then it's
not going to work as our main verb for
the sentence. And as we keep reading
you'll find that everything else doesn't
create a complete sentence (it's extra
information), but a lot of this is
dependent on some kind of independent
clause that's still to come.
[The] second example here shows our last rule,
our last thing to watch out for, and
that is that you want to watch out for
conjunctions.
So watch out for
conjunctions. And in this example here we
have "or" is our conjunction. "Or" needs to
tie back to the previous sentence, and if
we don't do that then we have a sentence
fragment. And you can see here that "or
from having no real friends" is not
complete.
Again, we have this present
participle here, but there's no helping
verb--we don't have "is" or "was" or
something like that, and there's no
subject. Who is having no real friends?
What's going on here? There's really
no subject in this sentence. So those are
our four things to watch out for. And I guess
we could add one more, which is that
always make sure you have a subject and
a verb. Final point to make, as we think
about fragments, fragments are not always
wrong. If you're an experienced writer
and you know how to kind of manipulate
language and you want to play an
experiment with it, then you can
occasionally stick in short fragment for
dramatic effect. But if you're not sure,
then I would suggest you just avoid it
for now.