#What does fragment mean in a sentence how to
#What does fragment mean in a sentence full

Water so hard it bends light, drills holes in rock and chokes up your radiator.' (Edward Abbey, 'Journey Home'. Salt, selenium, arsenic, radon and radium in the water in the gravel in your bones. 'The hawk sailing by at 200 feet, a squirming snake in its talons.Over the main entrance the words CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.' (Aldous Huxley, 'Brave New World', 1932) 'A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.Making the world seem ever smaller.' (ad for Lufthansa) Connections to over 170 European destinations. 'Departures from 22 North American gateways.Extraordinary the effect it has on a child.'' (Ian Fleming, 'Moonraker', 1955) 'Ogre's teeth.' Being bullied at school and so on. Yes, I expect that's what the psychologists will say when they get you into the lunatic asylum. Comes from sucking your thumb when you're a child. Curiously enough,' he went on conversationally, 'it may have something to do with your teeth. Megalomaniac hatred and desire for revenge. He looked levelly at the great red face across the desk. : a part broken off, detached, or incomplete The dish lay in fragments on the floor. White, 'Hot Weather.' 'One Man's Meat', 1942) The cicada of the typewriter, telling the long steaming noons. * * * Asterisks? So soon? * * * It is a hot weather sign, the asterisk.University of South Carolina Press, 1994) (Judith Kitchen, 'Culloden,' 'Only the Dance'. Time to drive on, toward Strathpeffer, friends, a phone call from my father. The sky hunkers down, presses, like a lover, against the land. (Tim O'Brien, 'LZ Gator, Vietnam.' The New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1994) Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire. In other cases, such as when a verb is missing an object, proofreading your work is usually enough to catch errors. In this case, the subject (‘we’) and verb (‘have’) make the second sentence complete. Alternatively, we could add a subject and verb to the fragment: Here, we say the same thing in one complete sentence, using the conjunction ‘because of’ to introduce the cause of the failure. The experiment failed because of a lack of time. We know what it means because it follows from the previous sentence, but to make it grammatically correct we’d need to connect the two: But the second part is a fragment without a subject or a verb. The first part of this is a complete sentence: it has a subject (‘experiment’) and a verb (‘failed’). The following, for example, contains a fragment: This means a sentence should contain at least a subject and a verb. This means making sure that each sentence contains at least one independent clause.

#What does fragment mean in a sentence full

However, in formal writing, you should use full sentences where possible.

Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter! As long as your reader can understand what you mean, it doesn’t usually matter if you use an incomplete sentence.

In less formal writing, all you need to do is ensure sentence fragments make sense. You wouldn’t use a fragment like this in formal writing, but it works well in some other cases.

But this use of ‘because’ has become common online as a way of suggesting that an explanation or reason is obvious. The ‘because grammar’ here is not a full sentence. Sentence fragments can also be used to create a particular effect, such as adding a pause to a statement. And in fiction, dialogue often includes sentence fragments to reflect how we speak in real life. But sentence fragments can be used in other cases.įragments are common in lists, for example. In formal writing, such as an essay, it’s always better to write in full sentences. But sentence fragments are also common in our daily lives, so many people use them in writing without realising that they’re (technically) incorrect. Sometimes it’s because something has been missed or because of an editing error. In this case, it should say ‘What do you call a sentence that isn’t complete?’. This tells us what the subject in a sentence is doing or being. The first sentence in this post, for example, is missing a complete predicate. In other cases, it’s because another part of the sentence is missing. starting with a capital letter and ending with a full stop, question mark or exclamation point), but which doesn’t include a full independent clause. This is usually something that is presented as a sentence (i.e. Put simply, a sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence.

#What does fragment mean in a sentence how to

Sentences are like jigsaws…Īnd since coming across an incomplete sentence while reading can be very frustrating, in this post we’re looking at how to handle sentence fragments.

What do you call a sentence that…? If you think something is missing there, you’re correct.