These words belong to a special class of words called subordinators or subordinating conjunctions. So what makes the thought incomplete? It’s the first word (Because, After, When, Since, If). If you want to go with me (…What should you do?)ĭoes each of these examples have a subject? Yes. Since you asked (…Will you get the answer?) When you finally take the test (…What will happen?) They’re just begging for more information to make the thoughts complete:īecause their car was in the shop (…What did they do?) They’re called “dependent” because they can’t stand on their own (just like some people you might know who are SO dependent!). The fragments that most students have trouble with, however, are dependent clauses-they have a subject and a verb, so they look like complete sentences, but they don’t express a complete thought. Some fragments are incomplete because they lack either a subject or a verb, or both.

Sentence fragmentsĪ sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence. No matter how long or short the other sentence parts are, none of them can stand alone and make sense.īeing able to find the main subject, the main verb, and the complete thought is the first trick to learn for identifying fragments and run-ons. 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 thought (it can stand alone and make sense-it’s independent).

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. 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. Fragments and Run-ons What this handout is about