What is a Fragment?
Incomplete sentence without a subject, verb, or complete thought.
Don't Leave Your Readers Hanging: Understanding Fragments
As a creative writer, it's important to communicate your ideas clearly and effectively, and one of the most common mistakes writers make is using sentence fragments.
What is a sentence fragment? It's an incomplete sentence that's missing a subject, verb, or complete thought, leaving readers confused and unable to understand the intent.
For example:
Walking down the street.
This isn't a complete sentence, as it's missing a subject and verb. Instead, it should be written as:
I was walking down the street.
Additionally, be wary of using sentence fragments for stylistic purposes, as it can easily become a crutch. Fragmented sentences can be useful in conveying a character's voice or mood, but it should never impede the readability or clarity of your work.
Remember, your goal as a writer is to create a seamless reading experience that will engage and captivate your readers. Don't leave them hanging with sentence fragments.
Reading the work of great writers can teach us a lot about how to craft our own stories, and sentence fragments are no exception.
In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner uses sentence fragments to convey the fragmented mental states of his characters, further emphasizing the themes of isolation and confusion.
The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.
Ernest Hemingway, known for his sparse and concise writing style, famously used sentence fragments to great effect in Hills Like White Elephants, where the lack of complete sentences creates a sense of tension and ambiguity.
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies.