When reading a piece of writing, you will sometimes come across sentence fragments, statements that are written out like a sentence, but are usually missing a crucial component. Most good English grammar software can capably catch such errors, although it’s quite easy to prevent them from occurring in the first place.
Here are some questions you need to bear in mind about sentence writing:
What do you mean by sentence fragments? How are you going to avoid it? Is it appropriate to use sentence fragments in formal writing?
Writing sentence fragments can be unintentional. However, it needs to be avoided when you are into writing. You need to give more details or information about your topic. You need to state your ideas or the flow of your content with a complete thought and in a clearer manner. Therefore, there is no space in writing for fragment sentences.
Sentence fragments are often use in improper way of stating your point of view especially in writing. It can’t stand alone unlike a real sentence does. Although there are a lot of words that are group together and act like a sentence yet it doesn’t’ even have any single independent clause. As a result, it has no means to make it as a complete thought.
For you to become an expert writer you need to stick with the basics and that includes structuring your sentences. As a matter of fact, readers can recognize sentence errors easily. Writers also need to learn not only to avoid these common errors but they should know how to correct these mistakes as well.
Besides, not all writers are perfect enough to write without any mistakes. There are even a lot of expert writers who are careless enough to commit grammatical errors in writing. Worst, they even fail to recognize these mistakes especially sentence fragments. That’s why reading and editing your work back can be of great help in order to fix your contents well.
There are common, identifiable causes for all types of sentence fragments. Because of that, they can be easily recognized, picked out and subsequently corrected.
Words that end in “ ing” are not definite verbs and cannot stand by themselves. As such, they always require a helping verb (such as “am,” “are,” “be,” “been,” “is,” “was” and “were”) and a subject in order to form a complete sentence. “The dog eating” is a sentence fragment that can be corrected by saying, “The dog is eating.”
Infinitives, which consists of “to” and the base form of a verb, cannot stand alone as the main verb of a sentence. You will need to use a definite verb to complete it. “The man to make it happen” is not a complete sentence, which can easily be fixed by correcting as “The man to make it happen is here.”
Subordinators can be a frequent cause of sentence fragments, because they force one part of a sentence to be dependent on another. These include words like “if,” “before,” “although,” “while” and other similar terms.
Some people make the mistake of using explanatory phrases as an actual sentence. Anytime you’re stating a sentence with “such as,” you’re likely committing this mistake.
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