How to Identify a Sentence Fragment
The first step to learning how to fix fragments in sentences is learning what one is. A sentence fragment is just another name for an incomplete sentence. A group of words must meet three requirements for it to be considered a complete sentence.
- Subject. A sentence must have a subject which is the person or thing performing the action in a sentence.
- Verb. A sentence needs a verb. This is the action performed by the subject in the sentence.
- Express a complete thought. To be a sentence the group of words must express a complete thought/idea.
A group of words that lacks one or more of these requirements is an incomplete sentence and is considered grammatically incorrect.
How to Correct Sentence Fragments in Your Writing
A sentence fragment will be missing either a subject, a verb, a subject and a verb, or it will fail to express a complete thought. The way how to fix an incomplete sentence is to add the missing requirement in order for it to be a complete sentence. The following are examples of incomplete sentences along with the corrections made to fix them:
- Sentence fragment missing a subject: “Walked to the supermarket to buy groceries.” The reader doesn’t know who walked to the supermarket. Correction: “Mike walked to the supermarket to buy groceries.” A subject, Mike, was added to make a complete sentence.
- Sentence fragment missing a verb: “The ship Mary was on.” The reader doesn’t know what action was taken. Correction: “The ship Mary was on sailed to Australia.” The verb “sailed” was added so the reader knows what action the subject took.
- Sentence fragment missing subject and verb: “Over the moon.” In this case, the reader doesn’t know who did what because both the subject and verb are missing. Correction: “The cow jumped over the moon.” A subject, “cow”, and a verb “jumped” were added to make a complete sentence.
- Dependent (subordinate) clause: “Because he missed the bus.” This phrase doesn’t express a complete thought although it has both a subject and a verb. It is a dependent clause. Correction: “Larry was late for work because he missed the bus.” In this case, an independent clause “Larry was late for work” was combined with the dependent clause to form a complete sentence. Starting sentences with subordinating words such as because, therefore, however, and whereas are a common cause of sentence fragments.
- Dependent clause 2: “So he was late for work.” This phrase has both a noun and verb but is a dependent clause because it doesn’t express a complete thought. Correction: “Larry missed the bus so he was late for work.” The independent clause “Larry missed the bus” was combined with the dependent clause to make a complete sentence. Starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) often results in a sentence fragment.
You may still be thinking how do I fix my sentence fragment and that’s understandable. Reading about independent clauses, coordinating conjunctions and subordinating words can be confusing. Don’t worry. There is hope as tools such as the free online sentence fragment checker we provide can help you with your incomplete sentence problems.
How Our Fragment Sentence Fixer Can Help You
You can detect and fix sentence fragment online in a matter of seconds when you take advantage of our sentence fragment corrector. The fragment finder will perform an analysis of your text and identify any sentence fragments it contains. It also provides recommendations on how to fix the fragments. There are a number of benefits to using our fragment corrector rather than proofreading and editing manually including:
- Saves time. The corrector is fast. It will detect all defects and correct fragment sentences online in a matter of seconds. Depending on the length of your paper it can save you hours.
- Identifies and corrects multiple types of errors. Our tool isn’t just for fixing sentence fragments. It is also good for correcting run on sentences, punctuation mistakes and other grammatical errors as well as spelling mistakes.
- Not subject to human error. When you proofread and edit manually it is easy to overlook mistakes if you are tired or in a hurry. You may also miss mistakes because you don’t recognize it is one. This is not an issue when using our writing tool which is accurate as well as fast.
Another benefit of using our tool is that it works on any type of text: You can analyze any text including academic papers and essays, emails, letters, blog posts, articles, memos or any other writing you have to proofread and revise. The fact that is corrects multiple types of mistakes and works on any type of text makes it an ideal editing tool for anybody. If you don’t know how to fix comma splices our sentence checker will identify and suggest corrections. Even though you may not know how to correct a fragment and a run on sentence you can be confident all such errors will be identified and corrected when you use our tool.
How to Use Our Fragment Sentence Checker to Revise Your Text
For a tool that does so much our online sentence checker is surprisingly easy to use. No special skills or training is required. To get started revising your text for incomplete sentence errors just take the following steps:
- Enter your text. Copy and paste the text you would like to analyze into the field provided. You can also type directly into the field.
- Start the text analysis. Click the button to begin the analyzing process. Depending on the length of your text it will generally take a minute or less.
- Get your report. You will be provided the results of the analysis that identifies any sentence fragments or other errors in your text. This includes recommendations on how to correct the mistakes.
- Make the recommended corrections
Just like that you will have a well polished and error free paper, essay or whatever type of text you are working on.
Try our sentence fragment detector to experience for yourself how to fix fragments in the fastest and most efficient way.
