What Is A Fragment In A Sentence

What is a Fragment in a Sentence?

When it comes to writing, one of the most essential components of a sentence is its completeness. However, sometimes we may come across sentences that are not complete or do not convey a clear message. These sentence fragments can confuse readers and disrupt the flow of our writing. In this article, we will explore what sentence fragments are, why they occur, and how to identify and fix them.

Understanding Sentence Fragments

A sentence fragment is a group of words that is punctuated like a sentence but lacks either a subject, a verb, or both. Essentially, it is an incomplete thought that cannot stand alone as a sentence. Instead, it leaves readers with unanswered questions, making it difficult to comprehend the intended meaning.

Causes of Sentence Fragments

Sentence fragments can occur due to various reasons, including:

1. Missing Subject

A sentence must have a subject, which is the noun or pronoun that performs the action or is being described. Without a subject, the sentence lacks a clear focus. For example:

"Walking in the park." (Fragment)
"I enjoy walking in the park." (Complete sentence)

2. Missing Verb

Similarly, a sentence must have a verb, which expresses the action or state of being. Without a verb, the sentence lacks the necessary action or description. For example:

"The sunset over the horizon." (Fragment)
"The sun sets over the horizon." (Complete sentence)

3. Dependent Clause

A dependent clause is a group of words that includes a subject and a verb but cannot stand alone as a sentence. It relies on an independent clause to form a complete thought. For example:

"Although she studied hard for the exam." (Fragment)
"Although she studied hard for the exam, she still struggled." (Complete sentence)

Identifying and Fixing Sentence Fragments

To ensure our writing is clear and coherent, it is crucial to identify and fix sentence fragments. Here are a few strategies to accomplish this:

1. Check for Subjects and Verbs

Review each sentence in your writing to ensure it contains both a subject and a verb. If either component is missing, revise the sentence accordingly by adding the missing element.

2. Connect Dependent Clauses

If you encounter a sentence fragment that consists of a dependent clause, connect it with an independent clause to form a complete sentence. This will provide the necessary context and clarity for readers.

3. Read Aloud and Proofread

Reading your writing aloud can help identify sentence fragments more easily. Additionally, proofreading your work carefully can help catch any fragments that may have been overlooked during the writing process.

Conclusion

Sentence fragments can disrupt the flow and comprehension of our writing. By understanding what sentence fragments are, why they occur, and how to identify and fix them, we can ensure our sentences are complete and convey our intended message effectively. Remember to always check for subjects and verbs, connect dependent clauses, and thoroughly proofread your work to eliminate any sentence fragments.

About Rephrasely

Getting your wording just right

Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Rephrasely helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.

When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Rephrasely, to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.

From keywords to paragraphs

Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.

A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.

Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.

You may well ask, “is this essay generator free?” Everything on this site is free within a 3-day trial, so you can test and develop confidence in our products. You may also be wondering where this is an essay automatic writer or if it will take a while to get results. All results appear within a matter of seconds, so you can move through your work as quickly as possible.

You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.

Plagiarism checker free

Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.