A basic sentence structure to fix fragments and run-ons

Who does what? What does what? If you want to write a complete sentence, you can ask yourself these two questions. They will help you create a basic sentence structure which you can build onto as needed. "Who/What" = the subject of the sentence, "does" = the verb or action of the sentence, and the final "what" = the predicate or the rest of the sentence. Here is an example: The dog ran into the neighbor's yard. Who does what? The dog (who)... ran (does)... into the neighbor's yard (what). This basic sentence structure can help you fix two problems in your writing, the sentence fragment and the ever popular run-on. If you have written a fragment, you will be missing one of the three parts: the who, the does, or the what. Read your sentence fragment aloud and ask yourself if it answers the question Who does what? That should help you fill in the missing pieces. If you have written a run-on, you will have strung a bunch of who does whats together and you need to find and separate them with punctuation. Look for your who/does pairs and highlight them. Somewhere in between these pairs will be where one thought ends and another begins. Take a guess on inserting a period and read aloud to check if it makes sense. A word of warning, there are weird subjects and verbs that don't seem obvious as a who/does or what/does pair. I talk about these in Part 1 and Part 2 of weird subjects and verbs.