In using a variety of sentence types in your writing, you will have errors. That’s inevitable (but you can correct them, of course). One of the most common errors that writers make are sentence fragments.

The basics

In past writing assignments, your professor may have written the word “Fragment” or “frag” or even “not a complete sentence” on your paper. A sentence fragment is a sentence that is missing a subject or a verb. While the sentence may include a description or may express part of an idea, it does not express a complete thought and that is the issue.

Look at the example below:

“Now hold on,” you might be saying, “you said at the start of this chapter that a sentence fragment is missing either a subject or a verb and that first sentence has both!”

You’re right. It does. There is a subject (we) and a verb (lost), but since the sentence begins with “because,” it does not feel like a complete idea. Read it aloud. It should sound like something is missing. Its incompleteness suggests that it’s a sentence fragment, and more specifically, a subordinate conjunction fragment. Fortunately, there is an easy fix. Let’s add another sentence just like last time.

Does something about this type of sentence seem familiar? It should. Structurally, it should remind you of the prepositional fragment we just fixed. Many writers will try adding another sentence to fix their sentence fragments, as in the example above, which is not actually fixing anything. The example above is obviously still wrong, but its similarity to the prepositional fragment example suggests how to fix it.

Be sure not to forget to include that comma between the two sentences if the subordinate conjunction starts the sentence.

Gerund fragments

Gerunds are a little more complicated. Essentially, when a word ends in “ing,” it can be either a noun, an adjective, or a verb. If the “ing” word is noun, or, in some cases, an adjective, then it is known as a gerund.

Let’s use the word “singing” as an example.

In the above example, singing is combined with a helper verb (is) to make is singing. In this case, singing is being used as a verb.

Now look at this example.

Don’t be fooled! Singing looks the exact same, but it’s not being used as a verb anymore. It’s a noun. More specifically, it’s the subject of the sentence. Now it’s a gerund.

Let’s look at one other example with the word working:

In the first sentence, working has a helping verb (was), which means it’s the verb form. In the second sentence, working is being used as the subject of the sentence, which makes it a noun. Therefore, it is a gerund.

If you need a little more help understanding gerunds, check out this link from Grammarly.

So what do these gerunds have to do with sentence fragments? Let’s look an an example of a gerund fragment:

In that example, taking is the gerund. Does the first sentence make sense on its own? Does it sound like a complete idea?

No. It doesn’t.

So how do we fix this? Well, like the other two fragment types we covered, we can combine the fragment with the next sentence by using a comma instead of a period.

You can also rearrange the order of the sentences. However, when you do that, you may have to add words so it makes sense.