Consider the following: There are many ways to frighten little brothers; for example, you could hide under their beds and wait for dark. Notice that in order to properly connect these two clauses with a semicolon, you need to do some rewriting in order to ensure both can function as independent clauses.
In other words, you need to fortify the fragment with a subject and a verb to turn it into a sentence. There are many ways to frighten little brothers. For example, you could hide under their beds and wait for dark. Without question, you should avoid sentence fragments in formal situations and academic writing.
That said, a fragment within a clear context can sometimes serve a valid dramatic purpose. Journalists, bloggers, and fiction writers often use them. For example: No one thought that Ethan could make the jump; it was just too high. All the same, he was determined to astound us. No matter what. Your high school English teacher would find three things wrong with this description. No matter what is a sentence fragment. As always, judge for yourself who your audience is and how much wiggle room you have for breaking the rules.
Real-time suggestions, wherever you write. This is a conventional journalistic practice, often used for emphasis. For academic writing and other more formal writing situations, however, you should avoid such journalistic fragment sentences. Some fragments are not clearly pieces of sentences that have been left unattached to the main clause; they are written as main clauses but lack a subject or main verb. These last three examples of fragments with no subjects are also known as mixed constructions , that is, sentences constructed out of mixed parts.
They start one way often with a long prepositional phrase but end with a regular predicate. Usually the object of the preposition often a gerund, as in the last two examples is intended as the subject of the sentence, so removing the preposition at the beginning is usually the easiest way to edit such errors. The subject is the who or what of a sentence.
The subject must complement the verb to tell us the whole story of a sentence. Without a subject, there is no one or nothing to do the action, resulting in an incomplete thought. Verbs tell readers what the subject is doing. When there is no verb communicating the action of a sentence, we have no idea what is happening. Make sure there is always a verb that makes clear the action in the sentence. Participle phrases often begin with a verb ending in -ing present or -ed past. These phrases function as adjectives, but they do not result in a complete thought on their own.
Clauses that begin with subordinators although, because, while, after, etc. A dependent clause needs an independent clause to complete the thought.
An appositive is a noun phrase that explains or defines the preceding noun or pronoun. Appositives, usually offset by commas, essentially add further identifying or clarifying information to the main subject.
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