Identifying Fragments
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Essential Question
How do we identify groups of words that do not express a complete thought?
Grammar in the World
Just like you would expect, sentence fragments are just pieces that don't express a complete thought. These are pieces that we can use to create full sentences, but we don't want to leave any fragments in our writing because they will be confusing for our reader. As you read through this lesson, you'll learn how to recognize sentence fragments and how to fix them!
What Do I Know?
Use the interactive below to see how much you already know about identifying fragments:
Building Blocks
Grammar is a complex system and structure of language. Mizzou Academy Grammar Lab spotlights one skill (or block) at a time, but it’s often helpful to see how a skill works together with other, related blocks to build the language structure as a whole. You may find the following resource topics helpful as context for this lesson:
Learn About Identifying Fragments
Imagine that you opened up your reading assignment from your Composition and Literature class and that this is what you read:
Beneath the blue sky. Went swimming in the afternoon. Because it was a beautiful day. Some of her friends. After school. Sipped a soda.
You would be very confused! What is going on in this story? Can you tell who is in the story and what is happening? No, you cannot, and the reason you cannot is that the paragraph is written in fragments, not sentences.
Before defining what a fragment is, let’s define what a sentence is. A sentence is a group of words that has a subject and a predicate and expresses a complete thought. An example of a sentence is My friends and I walked to the library this afternoon.
In the above sentence, My friends and I is the subject, and walked to the library this afternoon is the predicate.
A fragment, on the other hand, is a group of words that is missing a subject and/or a predicate and does not express a complete thought. We can take apart the example sentence above and make fragments out of its pieces:
My friends and I
walked to the library
this afternoon
None of those sentence pieces above makes any sense of their own. They only make sense when combined together.
Some fragments may be trickier to identify because they have both a subject and a predicate but do not express a complete thought because they begin with a subordinating conjunction. In this case, you will need to think about the third qualifying criterion of a fragment: that it does not express a complete thought. Fragments that begin with a subordinating conjunction leave you hanging and you don’t know what happens next.
- For example, what if your friend was telling you about a date she had last night, and she ended her story by saying, “After Marco expressed his love and undying devotion to me.”
What happens next? You don’t know because your friend used a fragment.
While there is a subject (Marco) and a predicate (expressed his love and undying devotion to me), this is a fragment because the group of words begins with a subordinating conjunction, “After."
Here are some clue words to look for when you are trying to identify whether a group of words is a sentence or a fragment:
after, although, before, if, since, until, when, where, while
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Note: Some sentences are just one word, and you could easily think that they are fragments and not complete sentences. However, In these sentences, which often are commands, the subject (usually “you”) is implied.
In addition, we write other words as sentences that do not actually have a subject or a predicate. When we greet someone, we may say, “Hello.” When someone asks us a question, we may respond with “Yes” or “No.” We also might communicate with one-sentence words like “Okay” or “Fine.” As a general rule, though, your sentences should have both a subject and a predicate. |
Do I Get It?
Use the interactive exercise below to check your knowledge on identifying sentence fragments: