4 Tips to Avoid Fragmented Sentences

Hello everyone! I’m Mr Ng Guo Liang, an English Language Curriculum Specialist and Teacher at Lil’ but Mighty.

In this blog post, I’m going to address something English language teachers quite certainly hate dealing with: sentence fragments. I want you to imagine holding a shard of glass or a broken fragment of glass. If you look at the fragment of glass, you know what it is: a piece of glass, but you also know that that piece is incomplete on its own and that more of such pieces of glass are needed for there to be something ‘complete’. That’s what it’s like for teachers when we read fragmented sentences — we sense what you mean to say, but it reads awkwardly because it is not ‘complete’.

What are fragmented sentences?

Sentence fragments — or fragmented sentences — can be more simply understood as incomplete sentences. In the same way you would know that a glass fragment is something incomplete or broken off from something ‘complete’, fragmented sentences are sentences in which you can sense that some information is missing for the sentence to be complete. This is a very common problem we teachers come across in students’ writing, and we often take a very long time to either address the problem, or to teach students how to avoid them. Which is why I thought I should write about it in this blog post.

And there it is, my dear readers, a perfect example of a fragmented sentence: “Which is why I thought I should write about it in this blog post.”

The word ‘which’ is a relative pronoun; in simpler terms, it is a word used in the middle of a clause or sentence to refer to something previously mentioned in that same sentence. For example, in the sentence ‘The blog post which you are reading now is about sentence fragments.’, it is very clear to us all that the word ‘which’ refers to ‘The blog post’, and it is clear because ‘The blog post’ is literally present in the sentence immediately before the word ‘which’.

However, what does the word ‘which’ in the sentence “Which is why I thought I should write about it in this blog post.” refer to? We don’t know because nothing came before it in the sentence! Hence, we say that the sentence is fragmented; the missing information renders the sentence incomplete.

How do I avoid writing fragmented sentences?

Wondering how you can avoid making such a mistake in your writing? Read on and find out how you can avoid sentence fragments by following these 4 simple suggestions:

1. Avoid using ‘which, who, like, such as’ to start your sentences

The first tip I have is to avoid starting sentences with words or phrases that are used to refer to something else. Some very common ones are ‘which’, ‘who’, ‘like’, and ‘such as’. All of these words are used to refer to things mentioned earlier on in a sentence. Some examples are:

• The dinner I had today was good because I ate my favourite dish. Which was very tasty.
• It had many of my favourite dishes. Like the dinner I had yesterday.
• My favourite teacher was Mrs Loh. Who made maths easier for me.
• I do not like subjects which I find difficult. Such as English and mathematics.

2. Avoid starting sentences with continuous (-ing) verbs

Starting a sentence with a continuous verb is fine if you know what you’re doing. (I just did!) However, for my readers who are less confident, my advice is to avoid doing so in your writing because there is a risk that you might end up with a fragmented sentence if you are careless. An example would be:

Jumping up and down with joy when I found out that there were no fragmented sentences in my writing.

Here, the reader knows that the person is happy because he or she made no grammar mistakes in his writing. However, the sentence reads awkwardly because it almost seems as if more needs to be said and that a comma should be inserted at the end instead of a full stop. There is just a sense that something is missing! This is because the continuous verb ‘jumping’ was used at the start of the sentence and this implies that there is a second action that should follow it, for instance:

Jumping up and down with joy when I found out that there were no fragmented sentences in my writing, I let out a whoop of delight. (second action)

To prevent this problem from happening, you should avoid using a continuous verb to start a sentence and use a subject instead:

I jumped up and down with joy when I found out that there were no fragmented sentences in my writing. (Complete sentence with the subject ‘I’)

The technique I used to correct the fragmented sentence above also happens to be my next tip!

3. Start sentences with a person, place, or thing

Notice how the fragmented sentence that started with the continuous verb ‘Jumping’ became complete once I amended it to start with a person: the pronoun ‘I’. Why is that so? This has to do with the way our language works. Without going into the complicated technicalities of the grammar, the simplest explanation I can provide is that the English language naturally follows a ‘subject—verb’ order. In English, when both the subject (‘I’) and its verb (‘jumped’) are present, it is much easier to form a complete sentence thereafter — and the most common subjects in English are people, places, and things.

I am not suggesting however, that all of your sentences be formed using the subject- verb structure. I would also discourage you from doing so because your writing would end up being predictable and bland. Using a variety of sentence structures is absolutely crucial in writing and also important for the development of one’s language competency. What I am saying, is that when you do spot a fragmented sentence in your writing, amending it using the subject-verb structure is one simple but effective way to go. It should not change the fact that your writing should consist of a variety of sentence structures!

That being said, how does one check for fragmented sentences?

4. Checking for sentence fragments: sentence isolation

As the heading would suggest, one simple way to check for sentence fragments is to isolate a sentence from all the others, and to see if it makes any sense on its own. I’ll use some of the examples I used above to illustrate this:

• The dinner I had today was good because I ate my favourite dish. Which was very tasty.
• It had many of my favourite dishes. Like the dinner I had yesterday.
• My favourite teacher was Mrs Loh. Who made maths easier for me.
• I do not like subjects which I find difficult. Such as English and mathematics.