Sentence Fragments
Sentence fragments are very common and easy errors to make. Many of us write with our casual speaking voice in our head, and when we speak, we often do not complete every thought to grammatical perfection. To put it simply, a sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence that you have punctuated as if it is a complete sentence.
Sometimes, fragments are missing a verb. Sometimes, fragments are missing a subject. Sometimes, a fragment is simply a dependent clause punctuated like a complete sentence. Here are some examples:
The business memo that my boss sent out yesterday.
Because the new policies involve a flexible, hybrid work week.
These sentence fragments might be understood perfectly well in a spoken conversation but, taken out of that context, these sentences are missing key parts.
You always have options about how you correct a sentence fragment, but essentially you need to add what is missing. Here are some possible corrections for our two sample sentence fragments:
The business memo that my boss sent out yesterday outlined several new, company-wide policies.
I am super excited about it because the new policies involve a flexible, hybrid work week.
Exercise 1: Instructions
- Identify the complete sentences.
- Don’t guess. Look for subjects and verbs, then make sure the sentence expresses a complete thought.
- Select the Check button to check you answers.
- “Sentence Fragment” is available at Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). This site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License.
- “Exercise 1” can be found in “Basic Sentence Structure,” in 1, 2, 3 Write! by Gay Monteverde. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
