What does a fragment sentence mean full#

Others are dependent clauses that are separated from main clauses. 'Some fragments are word groups that are missing a subject, a verb, or both. (Arthur Plotnik, Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style.

The narrative needs a recharge: namely, the power of verbs driving subjects.' Even with the drama provided by full-stop pauses, fragments soon run out of energy. 'Most fragments piggyback on the action of the sentences preceding them, adding some modifying detail or reinforcing imagery: The vacuum sucked the alien through the porthole. Garrett Bauman, Ideas and Details: A Guide to College Writing, 7th ed. Legitimate fragments: Whack! The stick caught the side of his head. Legitimate fragment: Why do politicians lie to the public? Because the public wants to be lied to. To answer your own rhetorical question or to create a fragmented impression in dramatic scenes. 'Legitimate Uses of Sentence Fragments:.Schuster, 'A Fresh Look at Sentence Fragments.' English Journal, May 2006)

What does a fragment sentence mean full#

To make exclamations more terse, use their fragmentary form.Īgainst company policy! She'd make an exception in my case! Though not for a full refund! (Edgar H. To give additional emphasis to negatives, isolate them as fragments.

For naturalness and economy, also express responses to questions in fragmented form.Īm I jealous that these people have been able to make more sense of Barth and Pynchon than I have? Probably. Our minds, of course, automatically filter much of this hubbub. To achieve a more natural, conversational tone as well as economy of expression, express questions in fragmented form. one could sort these scents in rows and categories: by herbs flowers fruits spices woods. To emphasize the individual items in a list or series, use a period rather than a comma between them. To create intense emphasis and succinctness, delete all but one of the major elements of an independent clause. It has the look of something a twelve-year-old would do. To create a dramatic pause for emphasis, use a period instead of some other mark of punctuation (or, more rarely, no punctuation at all) before a sentence-terminating element.

'Rules' for Making Effective Sentence FragmentsĮre are a few suggested rules for making effective sentence fragments:.

(Nicholas Visser, Handbook for Writers of Essays & Theses, 2nd ed. Be alert to the possibility of sentence fragments, and eliminate any that are likely to strike readers as errors rather than as deliberate and effective rhetorical devices.' The unintended fragment is another matter. When Winston Churchill recounted Hitler's boast that Britain was a chicken whose neck he would quickly wring, and then ended his account with the sentence fragment: 'Some chicken, some neck!' he demonstrated just how effective the deliberate use of an incomplete sentence can be. 'Bear in mind that a sentence fragment is successful only when it is clear to the reader that it has been used deliberately.

Deliberate and Unintended Sentence Fragments.

Those pink rattlesnakes down in The Canyon, those diamondback monsters thick as a truck driver's wrist that lurk in shady places along the trail, those unpleasant solpugids and unnecessary Jerusalem crickets that scurry on dirty claws across your face at night. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes slowly evaporating under a scum of grease, full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes, and down at the bottom, inevitably, the pale cadaver of a ten-inch centipede.

'Anyway-why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long.

(Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, 1926) A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches.' Perhaps the greengrocer's mother lived in the country. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders.

'Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages.

(Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A boyfriend who lifts heavy things for a living. Not just a boyfriend, but a good man, too.

'But she looked like she had a boyfriend.