Is it always wrong to write a sentence fragment?

What a wonderful question! No, it is not always wrong to write a fragment. However, you have to consider who you are writing to and why you are writing. If you are writing a cover letter for a job and your audience is your future employer, please don't write a sentence fragment. It will look sloppy. Same goes for research papers, formal essays, business reports, official emails and any writing in which you must perform professionally. On the other hand, professional creative writing uses fragments for artistic effect. A fragment in a well-written novel, story, poem, memoir, or creative non-fiction essay can be powerful. Yet, to break a rule with style requires knowing the rules. I think it was the artist Picasso who first learned to paint proper portraits and then bent "the rules" to create his colorful, twisted, memorable portraits for which he is famous. He said that he spent his youth painting like an adult and his adulthood painting like a child -- but his work is masterful. So, learn the rules, write complete sentences, definitely write complete sentences in formal written work, but play with words too, exercise your creativity, and try writing excellent sentence fragments.

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.

How do I make a run-on legal?

If you have a run-on in your writing, you have three easy choices for dealing with it: a period and capital, a semi-colon, or a comma plus and/yet/but. OK, that might need some explanation, so here is an example run-on and the easy fixes:
A run-on: There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace it only needed to be cleaned.
Option 1: There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace. It only needed to be cleaned.
Option 2: There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace; it only needed to be cleaned.
Option 3: There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace, and it only needed to be cleaned.
In my opinion, the last fix sounds unnatural although in other cases it will sound great. The second fix is appropriate because if you use a semi-colon, the second sentence has to add more information to the first and they must have a close relationship when it comes to their meaning. Finally, the first option is always a safe bet. When in doubt, use the period and capital fix. For other more advanced options, see my future post on phrases, clauses, and all those extra arms that sentences grow.

To the King of Run-ons:

Look. You've got too many strings of sentences and you're banging them together! ...I couldn't resist the Monty Python reference.


A run-on sentence most often shows up as two or more full-length sentences that you ran together with commas or no punctuation at all. Here is an example: "There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace it only needed to be cleaned, the service guy took a half hour to fix it." Since these ideas are closely related, you might think that a period doesn't happen until you change topics. But try reading this aloud and you notice pauses between furnace/it and cleaned/the. That is your first clue something must be done. First put a period when you pause, but you are not done checking yet! You have to check that you haven't made a sentence fragment. To do so, say these newly created sentences out loud, starting with the last one, and ask yourself if each makes sense: "The service guy took a half hour to fix it." Yes, that is sensible to say. Next, "It only needed to be cleaned." OK, fine there, and lastly "There was nothing terribly wrong with the furnace." Good! Keep in mind, if you use this trick and put periods each time you pause, you might end up with a sentence fragment and will have to rejoin it to its parent sentence with a comma -- your pause was correct, but deciding between a period or a comma depends on understanding both fragments and run-ons. Also, this is an auditory (listening) way to discover your run-on sentences and fix them. In other posts I will talk about fixing sentences by finding the subject and verb (the meat and potatoes) in what you've written.

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.