On Yani's birthday each year her grandmother bakes a chocolate cake. What is the best way to correct the fragment?: On Yani&srquo s birthday each year. The following passage contains a fragment. Which of the following phrases are fragments? Choose all that apply:. See below:Ĭorrected: I hang out with my friends from high school whenever I visit my hometown. See below:Ĭorrected: Whenever I visit to my hometown, I hang out with my high school friends.Īnother way to fix that fragment is to put the phrase with the conjunction after the complete idea. We can fix this fragment by placing a comma after the phrase that has the conjunction. See the example below:įragment: Whenever I visit my hometown. Sentences with connecting words (conjunctions) can make it easy to create a fragment. See below:Ĭorrected: I love reading good books, especially adventure stories. This kind of fragment can be fixed by putting a comma after the complete idea, before the incomplete idea. See the example below:įragment: I love reading good books. Sentences with an incomplete idea added at the end of a complete idea also cause fragments. See below:Ĭorrected: While walking by the house, the mailman noticed a hurt dog. We can fix this fragment by combining it with the sentence that comes after it. 
In the example below, the first group of words introduces the complete idea:įragment: While walking by the house.
Sentences that have introductory phrases can make it easy to create a fragment. Three Sentence Situations that Cause Writers to Accidentally Create Fragments I eat a lot of chocolate whenever I am nervous or bored. This fragment can be fixed by combining it with the previous sentence. Now imagine you tell a person, “Whenever I am nervous or bored.” Have you expressed a complete idea? Could that person understand exactly what you are trying to express? No. Imagine you walk up to a person you do not know and say, “I eat a lot of chocolate.” Does that make sense? Did you express a complete idea? Yes! That idea is a complete idea and can be understood by itself. If you said that sentence (by itself) to a person you do not know, would that person understand you? Look at the two sentences below. One way to check if your sentence is a fragment is to use the “random person” test. In the example above, there is now a subject (we), verb (played), and a complete idea. Sentence: We played all day at the beach. Now, let’s add a subject and a verb to the fragment: 
We do not know who was at the beach and we do not know what happened at the beach. In the example above, there is no subject, verb, or complete idea. A sentence fragment is missing a subject, a verb, OR a complete idea. Fun Fact: While a sentence must have a noun and predicate to be considered complete, answers such as “Yes.” and commands such as “Attack!” are classified as “sentence words.Grammar: Identifying Sentence Fragments Sentence Fragments and Ways to Find and Fix Them Example of a Fragment and How it was Fixed.Ī fragment is a “piece” (or part) of a sentence because it is missing information to make a complete sentence. Answer keys have been provided for sheets with definitive answers, but some sheets will have answers that will vary by student. Activities include identifying given phrases as sentences or fragments, rewriting sentences, completing sentences to avoid miscues, and more. A sentence fragment on its own may be correctly understood if it is the answer to a question. As with most English communication, context is important.
#Sentence fragment quiz pdf how to#
The following collection of activity sheets will help your students learn how to identify and correct sentence fragments. But if you are writing anything that is to be observed as formal, steer clear of fragments. We find that fragments often are found as acceptable in works of fiction, journalism, and blog writing. It is often a two-step process where we attach the missing components and then find a way to tie this into the independent clause. We can often fix this by getting rid of the period that exists between the fragment and the main clause. As readers we become accustom to given merit to anything that is properly punctuated as being acceptable and that is just not always the case. This usually escapes use because many times an incomplete thought can imitate complete sentence. Fragments usually are parts of sentences that are somehow disconnected from the main clause. As opposed to a complete thought that is exhibited by complete sentences. A sentence fragment is an incomplete thought or clause.
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