Testing for sentence fragments
We use sentence fragments all the time in conversation. All speakers recall what has been said before and are familiar with the attitudes and expectations of the people they are speaking with. A person might even say, “Coming?” which is obviously not a full sentence, but given a clear context, it would be easily understandable.
Sentence fragments should be avoided in written language, unless the writing is dialogue. In the course of writing, it is sometimes hard to identify sentence fragments because the context is so clear in the writer’s own head.
There is a way to test whether a piece of language is a fragment or a fully formed sentence — can it be turned into a question? Here are some sentence fragments:
1. Such as baking, frying, and roasting.
2. Coming home when the storm was over
3. Because I can’t swim.
4. Which is why we thought this should be changed.
No. 1 has no subject or verb, so cannot be made into a question. If you change no. 2 into a question, such as “Was the storm over when you came home?” a subject has been added and the verb has been changed, etc.
Once you provide this little test to your students, you can mark “fragment” or use a code to indicate “fragment”, and the student will know how to test it.
Exercise: The most effective way to drive this point home is to use fragments from student papers (without identifying and thus embarrassing the student) and asking the class to fix them.
I would like to more practice test about sentence fragments.