Barron's SAT Writing Workbook, 3rd edition (Barron's Writing Workbook for the New Sat) by Ehrenhaft Ed.D. George

Author:Ehrenhaft Ed.D., George [Ehrenhaft Ed.D., George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barron's Educational Series
Published: 2012-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

PROBLEMS IN SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Sentence Fragments

Broadly speaking, a sentence is a group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with an end mark of punctuation. It also conveys a more or less complete thought and is grammatically whole, which means that it has a subject and a verb.

Partial sentences, sentence fragments, often look remarkably like complete sentences but are not because of one or more grammatical defects.

The bicycle that Martha often borrowed.

This non-sentence seems to have all the characteristics of a complete sentence. It starts with a capital letter and ends with a period. It conveys a complete thought (Martha often borrowed the bicycle is a complete thought), and it appears to contain a subject and a verb. What makes it a fragment, though, is that the subject bicycle and verb borrowed don’t fit together. As an inanimate object, a bicycle can’t borrow or, for that matter, do much of anything else on its own. It was Martha who did the borrowing, but the noun Martha cannot be the subject of the sentence because it is part of the subordinate clause, that Martha borrowed. Therefore, bicycle needs a verb of its own.

The bicycle that Martha often borrowed was stolen.

With the addition of was stolen, the sentence is now complete.

Sentence fragments usually occur when writers fail to distinguish between dependent and independent clauses, when they confuse phrases and clauses, or when they attempt to use verbals as verbs. To determine whether a sentence is complete, uncover its bare bones. That is, deconstruct the sentence by eliminating dependent clauses, phrases, and verbals. If what remains does not have a subject and a verb, it’s probably a fragment.

To identify the subject of long sentences may take some doing, but the “bare bones” strategy usually works. Using this approach, you’ll strip away everything in a sentence but its subject and verb, a task that may be easier said than done. It’s not very formidable, though, if you remember that the grammatical subject can never be in (1) a prepositional phrase, (2) a dependent clause, or (3) a phrase that interrupts the flow of the sentence.

Frankly, identifying the bare bones of a sentence is often a more complex process than that suggested in the following examples. Sometimes the bare bones are buried deep within long and complicated sentences. But by carefully peeling away sentence parts that cannot contain the subject or verb, you’ll eventually find them.

To find the “bare bones” of a sentence:

Step 1: Look for prepositional phrases, such as up the wall, around the corner, to the beach, over the counter, and cross them out. For example, if you were to eliminate all the prepositional phrases in these sentences, only the subject and the verb—the “bare bones”—will remain.

Complete sentence:

In the middle of the night, Pricilla slept.

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