Fragments

Sentences have subjects and verbs; lacking one or the other, the writer’s meaning can be unclear. Such fragments are not appropriate for an academic essay. Sentences must normally have both a subject and a verb, that is, an actor and an action. If one or the other is missing, the result is a sentence fragment.

Examples of fragments include:

No verb/action:

• The busy summer streets of Santiago.
• Literary critics with a penchant for bourbon.

 No subject/actor:

• That never saw the light of day.
• Turning with little interest and a heavy heart.

At the other extreme, neither should a sentence run on line after line without a period; readers will not be able to keep up. Sentences can be long if they are clearly constructed and punctuated to help the reader through them, but running many ideas together in one sentence haphazardly can easily cause a reader to stumble over the meaning of the sentence.

 An example would be:

The lawyer was taken aback by her client’s description of the accident scene where she had not seen that many cars in one heap that her head was swimming.