
Wishing they’d brought their umbrella and dreaming of their nice warm bed, they waited for the bus all morning in the rain last Tuesday, determined to make it to class for their test.Īs your sentences grow more complicated, it gets harder to spot and stay focused on the basic elements of a complete sentence, but if you look carefully at the examples above, you’ll see that the main thought is still that they waited-one main subject and one main verb. Wishing they’d brought their umbrella, they waited for the bus all morning in the rain last Tuesday. They waited for the bus all morning in the rain last Tuesday. But independent clauses (i.e., complete sentences) can be expanded to contain a lot more information, like this: We can understand the idea completely with just those two words, so again, it’s independent-an independent clause. This sentence has a subject (They) and a verb (waited), and it expresses a complete thought. Some sentences can be very short, with only two or three words expressing a complete thought, like this:

A complete sentence has three components: What is a complete sentence? A complete sentence is not merely a group of words with a capital letter at the beginning and a period or question mark at the end.
#Examples of fragment sentence how to
The basicsīefore we get to the problems and how to fix them, let’s take a minute to review some information that is so basic you’ve probably forgotten it. It will help you locate and correct sentence fragments and run-ons. If instructors have ever returned your papers with “frag,” “S.F.,” “R.O.,” or “run-on” written in the margin, you may find this handout useful.


All other writers should avoid sentence fragments in their writing. Only very, very experienced writers may use fragments for stylistic purposes. Why are sentence fragments bad? Sentence fragments should be avoided at all costs. This fragment has a noun, “we,” and a verb, “leave,” but it isn’t a complete sentence.This fragment does not have a subject or a verb.Sentence fragments lack one or both of these elements, both of which are required to form an independent clause. In order to be a grammatically correct complete sentence, a sentence needs a subject (explicit or implied) and a verb. Since it isn’t a complete sentence, it must be reworked to be grammatically correct. In other words, it is only part of a sentence, not a complete one. What is a Sentence Fragment?Ī sentence fragment is exactly as it sounds: a “fragment” of a sentence.

Sentence fragment definition: A sentence fragment is a type of incomplete sentence that lacks the necessary grammatical elements to make an independent clause.
