Addressing fragments in a tutoring session

Fragments are a common, habitual grammar error found in students’ papers. The first time the error occurs in a paper, the tutor should point directly to the mistake and say “This is a fragment” and ask what the student knows about fragments. Build on any positive information the student remembers from class. Next, it helps to ask “Does the fragment belong to the sentence before or after it?” because usually the student has inserted a period in the middle of a long sentence and the fragment is like an orphan unaware that its parent is right next door. However, sometimes the fragment is not a portion of the sentence before or after it, in which case it helps to say “This is a fragment. What word(s) can you add or change to make it a complete sentence?” After addressing the fragment problem directly the first time, then it is best to challenge the student more when the error comes up again. The tutor can say, “There are two fragments in this paragraph. Read the paragraph backwards one sentence at a time to find them. How can you fix them?” This gives the student a method to successfully locate his own fragments.