A Word, Please: A more complete story about sentence fragments

When I was a kid, the “Do as I say, not as I do” school of parenting reigned supreme. Those adults lecturing children on the dangers of smoking? Smokers, one and all.

Kids would get in big trouble for swearing — and even worse trouble for using the “But you say that word” defense.

And who hasn’t figured out by now that “Get off that couch and go get some fresh air and exercise” really meant “Go outside so I can sit here watching trashy soap operas”?

Today, things are better. Fewer parents smoke. Mommy has 1,200 channels streaming in six rooms. And popular music has destroyed all hope you could ever stop little Billy from using the F-word over Thanksgiving dinner.

But I recently came across a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do scenario that not only still applies, it actually makes sense. It came after I made the following observation in a column about semicolons: “Sometimes they’re useful. Invaluable even.”

A reader named Cathy wrote “Is ‘Invaluable even’ a true sentence? Or just something that works in today’s conversational writing style?”

If Cathy were an inquisitive little 10-year-old, my answer might have contained a stern lecture on the evils of the sentence fragment, accompanied by a short soliloquy on the importance of proper grammar. But because Cathy’s a grown-up, my answer was more along the lines of “Nah. Not a complete sentence. But whatev.”

Sentence fragments are bad — if you’re a kid turning in a school assignment. For us grown-ups, though, fragments are often fine. Don’t believe me? Read through just about any book and you’ll see that professional writers, including the very best writers, use them all the time.

Here’s an example from “Beloved” by Toni Morrison: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom.” That second bit? Sentence fragment. One of countless thousands of examples in literature and media.

It’s a double-standard: Kids who use sentence fragments get corrected. Adults who use them get Pulitzers. But there’s a reason: You have to know the rules before you can break them. So kids need to be restricted in ways adults often don’t.

Often, but not always. Grown-ups do sometimes use bad sentence fragments — clusters of words meant to be complete sentences but that don’t quite qualify. They can be truly awful. So here’s a refresher.

To be complete, a sentence needs, at the very minimum, a main clause consisting of a subject and a verb. Jesse laughed. The mice scurried. Traffic stinks.

Some sentences require more to make sense, often the object of a transitive verb, like “cats” in “Mice fear cats.”

These clauses can be adorned with all kinds of different sentence elements, like adverbials and introductory phrases: “In Joe’s house, mice scurry under the baseboard very quickly.” But what makes these complete sentences is that they have a main clause consisting of a subject and a verb.

Interestingly, one-word commands like “Stop!” and “Eat!” qualify as complete sentences. Why? Because the imperative form contains the implied subject: you. But for all other forms, you need at least two words — a subject and a verb.

A subordinating conjunction like “because” or “which” can complicate this formula. Take a complete sentence like “Mice scurry,” put “because” on the front, and you now have a fragment: “Because mice scurry.”

That’s why they’re called subordinating conjunctions. They demote clauses to a state in which they can no longer stand on their own as sentences. They need another clause — a main clause — to make the sentence complete: “Because mice scurry, we seldom see them.”

In my experience, most of the time that an adult uses a sentence fragment badly, a subordinating conjunction is the culprit. The writer begins a sentence with “because,” “which,” “although” or some other subordinator, then blathers on too long — so long that he forgets how the sentence started. Usually, that’s just carelessness. Not ignorance. After all, we’re grown-ups. Masters of the fragment.
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JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.