Basic mistakes

Fragments

There are many ways of defining what a sentence is. We can say that a sentence usually has a
subject and a predicate, and we can say that a sentence begins with a capital letter and
finishes with a period, or we can highlight the fact that a sentence consists of a set of words
that forms an independent unit of meaning. Considering this, we can say that the following set
of words:

“I married her.”

is a sentence. We could add something about the reasons why “I married her” by pointing to
the fact that “I married her because I love her.” Now we have one sentence but two clauses (“I
married her” and “because I love her”), each with its own subject and verb. The difference
between these two clauses lies in the fact that the first one is INDEPENDENT and has the
potential to become a full sentence (“I married her”) while the other is DEPENDENT and
cannot appear in isolation (*”Because I love her” cannot possibly become a sentence firstly
because it is an INCOMPLETE idea). The INDEPENDENT clause is also known as the
SUBORDINATE clause and the INDEPENDENT clause is known as the MAIN clause. What
happens when we are writing is that sometimes we include incomplete ideas that cannot
really be sentences because they “depend” on something else to make sense, as shown in the
example above. This mistake is called FRAGMENT or SENTENCE FRAGMENT, which means that
a sentence is not complete.

The following are examples of fragments:

1) “The mountainous coastline with grand, fjord-like waterways.” (This is a fragment

because we only have the subject but no predicate)

“The mountainous coastline greets you with grand, fjord-like waterways.” (Sentence)

2) “If you approach New Zealand’s South Island for the southwest.” (This is a fragment
because we only have the condition part of a conditional sentence)

“If you approach New Zealand’s South Island from the southwest, the mountainous
coastline greets you with grand, fjord-like waterways.” (Sentence)

3) “We plan to visit the strangely beautiful Lake Taupo area of North Island. Boiling
springs, hot geysers, pools of steaming mud, and waterfalls cascading from volcanic
peaks.” (This is a sentence followed by a fragment. We can correct this mistake by
combining the fragment with the sentence)

“We plan to visit the strangely beautiful Lake Taupo area of North Island with its
boiling springs, hot geysers, pools of steaming mud, and waterfalls cascading from
volcanic peaks.” (Sentence)