Spotting a sentence fragment

Coming up soon. Incidentally, that was a sentence fragment. So's the title, and this too. ... OK, back to work.

A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence, as if you only said half of something so that your thoughts aren't understandable by others. A sentence fragment is pretending to be a sentence because you have capitalized the first word and stuck a period on the end; however, it can't stand on its own. A good way to check for sentence fragments in your writing is to cover up all other sentences around the one you are checking and then read it aloud. Here is an example: Betting on race horses down at the track. What would happen if I came up to you in the hall and said "Betting on race horses down at the track." You would look at me funny and say, "What?" You could tell that some information, a piece of my statement, was missing. What usually happens when people write sentence fragments is they end a sentence and thought with a period before they are actually done with it. In a paper, this example would be written wrongly like so: "Charlie had a habit of losing his money every Sunday after paydays. Betting on race horses down at the track." The writer here stuck on a period before the sentence was done, and we can catch this error if each sentence is read aloud in isolation by covering up all other sentences around it. Another trick to reading your sentences in isolation is to read your paper from the bottom up. That way you are reading against the flow of thoughts and it will often help you to catch errors. For the answer on how to punctuate this example correctly, see my future post on the sneaky ing-phrases.