English Grammar for the Utterly Confused - Laurie Rozakis 2003

Most Common Sentence Errors
Chapter 6 The 25 Most Common Usage Problems
Part 2 Usage and Abusage

12. Fragments (incomplete sentences)

Fragment: If you want to be clearly understood.

Correct: Don’t write sentence fragments if you want to be clearly understood.

Every sentence must have three things:

• A subject: the “doer” of the action. The subject will be a noun or pronoun.

• A verb: what the subject does.

• A complete thought.

The fragment in this example is missing a subject and a verb. As a result, the group of words does not express a complete thought. See Chapter 8 for a complete discussion of sentence fragments.

13. Run-ons (two sentences run together)

Run-on: Daddy longlegs spiders are more poisonous than black widows, daddy longlegs spiders cannot bite humans because their jaws won’t open wide enough.

Correct: Daddy longlegs spiders are more poisonous than black widows, but daddy longlegs spiders cannot bite humans because their jaws won’t open wide enough.

or

Daddy longlegs spiders are more poisonous than black widows; however, daddy longlegs cannot bite humans because their jaws won’t open wide enough.

A run-on sentence occurs when two complete sentences (“independent clauses”) are incorrectly joined. Sentences can only be joined with a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet) or a semicolon—a comma doesn’t cut the mustard. See Chapter 8 for a complete discussion of sentences.