The unintended fragment is another matter. When Winston Churchill recounted Hitler's boast that Britain was a chicken whose neck he would quickly wring, and then ended his account with the sentence fragment: 'Some chicken, some neck!' he demonstrated just how effective the deliberate use of an incomplete sentence can be. "Bear in mind that a sentence fragment is successful only when it is clear to the reader that it has been used deliberately. Deliberate and Unintended Sentence Fragments.Those pink rattlesnakes down in The Canyon, those diamondback monsters thick as a truck driver's wrist that lurk in shady places along the trail, those unpleasant solpugids and unnecessary Jerusalem crickets that scurry on dirty claws across your face at night. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes slowly evaporating under a scum of grease, full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes, and down at the bottom, inevitably, the pale cadaver of a ten-inch centipede. "Anyway-why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long.(Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, 1926) A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches." Perhaps the greengrocer's mother lived in the country. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. "Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages.(Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A boyfriend who lifts heavy things for a living. Not just a boyfriend, but a good man, too. "But she looked like she had a boyfriend.The most important thing is that every sentence has a main clause including a subject and verb, but watch out for other sentences that seem unfinished or ambiguous throughout your work. The study examined several species, including canaries, budgies and doves. However, since there’s no reason to use a sentence fragment here, it would be better to remove the period and join the clauses with a comma: Here, the clause that starts with “Including” is a fragment, though we can guess that it’s a list of birds included in the study. In other cases, we might understand what the author means by a sentence fragment, but unless there is a good reason for using one, it is still better to write in full sentences. As such, this fragment would need completing before it makes sense. Here, there’s obviously something missing from the sentence, since “because” is meant to introduce a reason. Sentence fragments become an issue when it is hard to tell what someone is saying. And you’ll find them used in advertising and pop culture all the time! As long as you can understand them, this isn’t a problem. More generally, we all use sentence fragments in our own lives. But by using a period instead of a comma, the author adds a dramatic pause before the fragment to emphasize how loud the budgie is. In the second, “But loud” is technically a sentence fragment. No Fragment: The budgie was small, but loud.įragment: The budgie was small. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |