Can anyone suggest tips for recognizing sentence fragments before my computer grammar editor does? Not the obvious short sentences, like “The rain on my garden” -- but long wordy sentences used as follow up to other long sentences. For example, I incorrectly added the following frag after a casual dating introduction: “Bowling a couple of lines at the local alley, sharing a box of popcorn in the movies, and riding a carousel in the park with the little kids just for laughs.”
Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :
Who is doing these things? This is why the sentence isn't complete.
Posted by pantros (Member # 3237) on :
Sentence Fragments are not a bad thing when used right. Not everything you put in a story needs to be a complete sentence.
Your word processor frequently sees words in the wrong state. You might be using a Proper Name that it doesnt recognize as a subject or object or your verb might not be a word we see used as a verb frequently.
Basically, if your work processor flags something as a fragment. Read it through and if you think its a sentence, ignore the grammar checker.
Posted by pantros (Member # 3237) on :
In that last example, you do need to to have a subject.
Sentence Fragments are not always a bad thing.
Run on Sentence Fragments are an atrocity and require very special handling.
Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :
I find that the best remedies for problems I know that I have are (a) a fresh pair of eyes, ideally not mine, and (b) doing a separate reading specifically for the problem. That may entail a lot of re-reading, but I find that I'm actually more efficient in the long haul because each reading is very focused. In your case, you'd read each sentence to specifically identify its subject and main verb.
Something that might help here -- not speaking from personal experience now -- is to start at the end of the story, reading the last sentence first and working your way to the first. (In other words, the story is read backwards by sentence, but each individual sentence is read normally.) This is supposed to force each sentence out of the context you'd normally see it in, which makes you analyze each sentence on its own merits. In this case, that means eliminating the implied subject that you're leaving out of the fragments.