V World

The Sentence Fragment

Recognize a fragment when you see one.

A fragment results whenever you do these three things:

•  You begin a group of words with a capital letter.
•  You conclude this group of words with an end mark--either a period (.), question mark (?), or exclamation point (!).
•  You neglect to insert a main clause somewhere between the capital letter at the beginning and the end mark concluding the word group.

Every sentence must have at least one main clause. A main clause contains an independent subject and verb and expresses a complete thought. Once you have a main clause, you can then add whatever other grammatical elements you need, but you must have the main clause as the base of the sentence

Fragments result if you punctuate certain word groups as though they were complete sentences. The most common of these word groups are the following: subordinate clauses, participle phrases, infinitive phrases, afterthoughts, verb phrases, and appositives. 

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