Three Sentence Situations that Cause Writers to Accidentally Create Fragments I eat a lot of chocolate whenever I am nervous or bored. This fragment can be fixed by combining it with the previous sentence. Now imagine you tell a person, “Whenever I am nervous or bored.” Have you expressed a complete idea? Could that person understand exactly what you are trying to express? No. Imagine you walk up to a person you do not know and say, “I eat a lot of chocolate.” Does that make sense? Did you express a complete idea? Yes! That idea is a complete idea and can be understood by itself. If you said that sentence (by itself) to a person you do not know, would that person understand you? Look at the two sentences below.

One way to check if your sentence is a fragment is to use the “random person” test. In the example above, there is now a subject (we), verb (played), and a complete idea. Sentence: We played all day at the beach. Now, let’s add a subject and a verb to the fragment: We do not know who was at the beach and we do not know what happened at the beach. In the example above, there is no subject, verb, or complete idea. A sentence fragment is missing a subject, a verb, OR a complete idea. Grammar: Identifying Sentence Fragments Sentence Fragments and Ways to Find and Fix Them Example of a Fragment and How it was Fixed.Ī fragment is a “piece” (or part) of a sentence because it is missing information to make a complete sentence.

Fragments meaning grammar