| Eliminating
Fragments
Our ability to communicate with each other depends on
our ability to use and understand sentences. Sentences express our
complete thoughts. We all already can identify, recognize, and use
complete sentences. In fact, we have such a strong sense of what a
sentence is that it can sometimes cause us problems—we tend
to automatically fill in a context for fragments. We make implicit
sentences out of them. This tendency is a problem when we write because
it often means that we “read right over” fragments in
text, especially when it’s our own text.
One thing we can do to compensate for this tendency is to read paragraphs
backwards. In other words, read the last sentence first, then the next-to-last
sentence, and so on. What this technique does is force us to separate each sentence from
the one that would normally come before it and makes it harder for
us to fill in a context since we often rely on information from the
preceding sentence to fill in with. Complete sentences must be able
to stand alone without relying on previous context.
The next step is to ask yourself whether the sentence can stand alone.
One way to do that is to imagine that each sentence is the first sentence
a friend says to you in a conversation. If the sentence conveys a
complete message, then it is a complete sentence. If it does not,
it is a fragment.
Consider the following scenario. John walks up to you and says, “Because
the polka-dotted cow stood on her head, the farmer came down with
measles.”
Obviously, the message is fantastic and silly, but you probably would
still recognize it as a complete message.
But if John came up to you and said, “with measles,” or “because
the polka-dotted cow stood on her head,” you would likely feel
that some part of the message was missing. You would recognize that
those statements were fragments.
The next step, obviously, is to fix the fragment. We can fix a fragment
in one of two ways—we can either attach the fragment to another
sentence (usually the one right before it in the paragraph), or we
can expand the fragment to include what is missing (usually a subject
or verb).
For instance, you have isolated the following group of words in a
paragraph and realize that it is a fragment: “If the proposal
succeeds.” Your next step is to check the sentence before and
the sentence after the fragment to see if it can be logically attached
to one of them (chances are it can), and you notice that the sentence
before it says, “We will proceed immediately with the project.” The
fragment can logically be attached to this sentence to form a complete
thought: “We will proceed immediately with the project if the
proposal succeeds.” Or you can attach the fragment to the beginning
of the sentence so that the sentence reads, “If the proposal
succeeds, we will proceed immediately with the project.”
In some rare instances, you might find a fragment that can’t
logically be attached to another sentence. In that case, ask yourself
first whether the information actually belongs in the paragraph and,
if it does, expand the fragment to provide the pieces necessary to
create a complete sentence.
So, to eliminate fragments from your writing do the following steps:
- Isolate the sentence by reading the paragraph backwards
- Imagine
the sentence as the first sentence of a conversation
- Fix the fragment
by attaching it to another sentence or expanding it.
You can test your understanding of this handout by completing Academic
Center exercises available
here.
|
