18.1: Fragments

A complete sentence has two grammatical requirements. It must include a subject and a verb, and it must express a complete thought. If your sentence does not meet one of those requirements, it will be a fragment. Fragmentary sentences are not only grammatically incorrect, they also are often missing vital information required to communicate ideas.

If you are having issues with fragments, you would benefit from a brief grammar review, but you also need to slow down (especially when revising and editing your work) and have some patience with words. Remember, your goal in writing a sentence is always clarity, and missing information interferes with that goal.

Subjects and Verbs

When assessing if a sentence is complete, you must first locate its subject and verb. The subject is either the thing performing the action in the sentence or the thing whose condition the sentence discusses, and the verb is either the action being taken or the state of that condition. (A reminder: As you will see in the examples below, verbs also denote time (past, present, or future tense), voice (active or passive) and mood (the most common being indicative and subjunctive/conditional).

Examples:

1. The students (s)ubject sit (v)erb at the table.
2. The family scrambled to get on board the subway before the carriage doors closed.
3. I will buy those at the store for you tomorrow.
4. The cool kids would have gone to the party if they had known you were there.
5. I am the very model of a modern major general.
6. What on earth are you doing?
7. A new chapter in our world’s history is being written by the COVID pandemic.
8. It would have been worth it after all.

Missing a subject or verb

If a subject or verb is missing from a sentence, the sentence is most likely a fragment. Many times, fragments occur because students do not take the time to proofread their sentences aloud. Chances are, if you take the time to think about each sentence, you can spot those that are fragmentary sentences because they lack a subject or verb.

(Note: Sentences using the imperative (or “command”) mood of a verb—“Be all that you can be”; “Don’t stay out too late”—do not have explicitly-stated subjects; rather, we say that the subject is understood or implicit. That is, we know that the speaker directs such statements toward someone, the 2nd person, “you,” and the subject is thus understood.)

Complete Ideas

The first prerequisite for a complete sentence—it must have a subject and a verb—is a straightforward grammatical concept, but the concept of a “complete idea” is more subjective. However, there are simple red flags that can help you check for complete ideas in your sentences.

If your sentence begins with a subordinating term, your sentence could be a fragment. For example, you might have been told not to begin a sentence with “because.” It is perfectly acceptable to begin a sentence with “because,” but you need to remember that beginning a sentence in that way makes the clause that follows it dependent, meaning that it will need further explanation in the sentence past the first clause to be a complete idea.

Example of fragment: Because he loved teaching his own children.

While this sentence has a subject (he) and a verb (loved), the sentence is not a complete thought. Because he loved teaching his own children . . . what happened? That love seems to have led to some future result, but we have no idea what it is. The reader needs to have more information to know that result; thus, the sentence is considered a fragment.

To fix it, then, we need to add that information to the sentence to complete the idea:

Example of fixed sentence: Because he loved teaching his own children, Dave decided to major in early childhood education and become an elementary school teacher.

If you have a fragment due to an incomplete thought, the dependent thought most likely goes at the beginning or end of a sentence. If the dependent idea goes at the beginning of a sentence (hey—just like the clause in front of this parenthetical statement!), it is an introductory clause. These clauses usually answer journalistic questions: Who? What? When? Where? How? These clauses also generally begin with one of the subordinating terms listed below:

after	in order that	until
although	on	when
as	once	whenever
because	provided that	where
before	rather than	whereas
even if	since	wherever
even though	so that	whether
if	though	while
in	unless	why

Examples of fragments that are introductory clauses:

Even though it was illegal. Douglass taught himself to read and write.

Whenever you call me. I’ll be there.

Since you have already done that. There’s no need to do this or the other thing.

Until you hear from them. Don’t accept the offer from your “safety school.”

Before you go. Read the State Department’s travel advisories for the places you want to visit.

To correct these, all you have to do is change the first period to a comma and then make the first letter of the second sentence a lower-case letter.

There is also a chance that the incomplete thought belongs at the end of a sentence, though this happens less often. Usually, with an incomplete complex sentence you have the missing element in the next sentence, and the clauses need to be joined with a comma rather than separated with a period.

Examples of fragments that belong to the end of a sentence:

Frederick Douglass taught himself to write thought many tactics. Including learning from workers in a shipyard.

They enjoy reading and listening to music during weekday evenings. And relaxing at home or taking short trips on the weekends.

Read the State Department’s travel advisories for the places you want to visit. Especially if you have heard stories in the news that make you uneasy.

She said Dude, Where’s My Car? was the finest film she had ever seen. Which, considering we had just seen Vertigo together, took me by surprise.

So I drifted down to New Orleans, and I was lucky to be employed. Working for a while on a fishing boat right outside of Delacroix.

Once again, correcting all of these is simply a matter of changing the periods to commas and the first letter of the second clause to a lower-case letter.

Words that often begin a subordinated clause after the complete thought:

including	like
though	which

For more help, see this video on how to identify and fix fragments, this lesson and practice over fragments from Khan Academy.