Welcome!
Welcome to the Learning Commons Quick Start Guide on how to avoid sentence fragments!
While an easy mistake to make, sentence fragments can harm reading comprehension and make your essay quality fall substantially. This Guide will explain:
- What sentence fragments are
- How to fix sentence fragments
Course Information
Course Level: Beginner
Time to Complete: 15 mins
Perfect for: Students in WRTG100/101, ENGL103, or anyone who needs a refresher.
Guide Creator: Alice Wu
Sentence Fragments 101
This video is a primer on what makes for a sentence fragment:
- Sentence fragments do not tell “the whole story”
- Missing predicates
- Missing subjects
In this mini-course we explore this in more detail:
- Independent clauses
- Dependent clauses
- Easy fixes
- Wrap-up
Topic 1: Independent Clauses
Independent clauses are a necessary part of any proper sentence. These clauses should contain a subject and a verb. Sometimes a verb will require an object as well.
Who and what the sentence is about. It is usually a noun or a pronoun.
- Noun: a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Pronoun: Substitutes for nouns – he, she, it, I, you.
- Verb: What the subject of the sentence does or is. This can be an action verb or non-action verb.
- Action verbs: Jump, shout, run, dance.
- Non-action verbs: am, is, are, was, were. Has, have.
- Object: A person or thing affected by the action of the verb. Or, for the non-action verbs, it gives more information about the subject.
Using this chart can help us make sure our sentence is an independent clause:
Notice that the subject or object part of the sentence can have more than one word.
| Subject | Verb | Object |
I John My new dog A good business strategy My friend Jessica | bought is doesn’t want is has | textbooks. the one who told me about the job. a bath. extremely important. a delicious bagel sandwich. |
Your Turn: Test Your Understanding
Think you’ve got a good grasp on what makes an independent clause? Test yourself!
Topic 2: Dependent Clauses
The inverse of independent clauses, dependent clauses do not make sense by themselves and need to be “propped up” by an independent clause to be grammatically correct.
- Dependent clause:
- A dependent clause is an incomplete sentence. It “depends” on an independent clause.
- These are incomplete sentences because they are not complete thoughts. Since it is not a complete thought, it does not make sense on its own. To make it a complete thought and a complete sentence, we need to add more to the sentence, like those parts of speech we talked about in the last section: subjects, verbs, and objects.
- It is important to remember that, if we do not change the dependent clause, it will need an independent clause to be correct.
Examples
The following two clauses are dependent:
- Because I forgot to buy my textbooks.
- When the textbooks arrived.
Here is what those clauses look like when they are corrected by adding an independent clause:
- Because I forgot to buy my textbooks, I was not able to complete my first assignment on time.
- I was finally able to start on my assignment when the textbooks arrived.
These are complete, grammatically correct sentences.
Now you are finally ready to read it: when they do not have an independent clause tied to them, dependent clauses are fragments.
Topic 3: How to fix a Sentence Fragment
As you could probably tell from the examples of dependent clauses/sentence fragments on the previous page, sentence fragments do not make a lot of sense. The flip side of this difficulty is that sentence fragments are really easy to spot when you know what you are looking for (like you do now!)
But what can we do to fix these confusing clauses?
Options for Fixing Sentence Fragments
Hover over the cards below to see options for revising sentence fragments.
Examples:
- Incorrect: I was not able to complete my first assignment. Because I forgot to buy my textbook.
- Correct: I was not able to complete my first assignment because I forgot to buy my textbook.
In the above, the dependent clause “Because I forgot to buy my textbook” is tied to the independent clause, making a proper sentence.
- Incorrect: When the textbook arrived. (A subject and verb is missing!)
- Correct: I was finally able to start on my assignment when the textbooks arrived.
And in these two sentences, the dependent clause is made independent by adding a subject and a verb.