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A sentence is made up of a subject plus a verb plus a full thought, so a sentence fragment is just a fragment, or a scrap, of a sentence. It’s a phrase or a clause that does not meet all the criteria of a sentence.
Sometimes these fragments are missing the verb, but most of the time, it's the subject that's been left out.
EXAMPLE
Wanted to cross the bridge.See how there’s a verb and part of a thought, but the subject is missing? Who wanted to cross the bridge?
A common fragmented sentence will be a dependent clause punctuated as if it were a full sentence. It may have a subject and a verb, but the complete thought is missing.
EXAMPLE
Because the river was frozen.The word "because" is your clue that not everything is here. Sentence fragments are important to spot in your writing, since they can confuse your readers with unclear, half-formed ideas.
To identify a sentence fragment, ask yourself questions about a suspect sentence. These questions will help you sort out if a sentence is a fragment or complete:
What if you’ve asked yourself all three questions and you still aren’t sure? Then you can use this trick: When you read your sentence, tack on the phrase "it is true that" to the beginning of that sentence. If the sentence still makes sense, then it’s complete. If it doesn’t, then you know you have a fragment.
If your sentence is missing a subject or a verb, then all you have to do is add one in.
Consider this sentence: The big, brown cow in the field of grass.
What is missing? Is there a subject? Yes, "the cow." Do you see any action? No, so the verb is missing. You can make this sentence complete by adding in a verb: The big, brown cow sat in the field of grass.
Now look at this sentence: Ate the soup with a spoon.
Here, you have a verb ("ate") and a noun ("spoon"), which could be the subject. But is the spoon doing the eating? No, so that is your clue that the subject is missing and needs to be added: She ate the soup with a spoon.
As mentioned earlier, there is another kind of fragment, which is a dependent clause incorrectly punctuated as a sentence. You’ll see this happen when the independent clause either follows or leads the dependent sentence fragment in a paragraph.
EXAMPLE
Because she was hungry.This has a subject and a verb, but the word "because" signals that this is meant to complete a thought that isn’t all here. To correct this, you just need to pair this sentence fragment with an independent clause to make it complete.
EXAMPLE
She served herself soup because she was hungry.Or, if you really wanted to, you could remove the subordinating conjunction (the word "because"), and then the dependent clause will be complete. "She was hungry" is an independent clause and a full sentence.