How do I write a complete sentence?
Answer
A common issue students run into when writing essays is accidently using incomplete sentences. These are also sometimes called "sentence fragments", because they are only part of a complete sentence - they cannot stand alone.
To be complete, a sentence must include two things: a subject (person or thing the sentence is about) and a predicate (description of action/verb).
Here are examples of complete sentences with the subjects in bold and the predicates underlined:
- She sleeps.
- He went outside.
- The professor graded the student's assignments.
To demonstrate what an incomplete sentence looks like, here are a few examples:
- My school.
- Brought them some coffee.
- Went outside.
As you can see, sometimes a subject or predicat is one word, and sometimes it is multiple words. The important thing to keep track of is that the sentence has a noun and a verb of some kind. The incomplete verbs leave some question for the reader (What is happening to your school? Who went outside?), so they are not a complete thought. Avoiding sentence fragments like this will make your writing much clearer.
Check out the link below for some exercises to practice identifying sentence fragments.