In traditional grammar, sentence fragments are usually treated as major errors, and students are sternly counseled to avoid them. "Always write in complete sentences," the handbooks insist. "Every one of your sentences should contain both a subject and a predicate."
But as students soon figure out, this rule applies only to their sentences, not to the sentences of professional writers. A quick look at the "model essays" included in freshman English anthologies reveals that fragments can be found just about everywhere.
Here are a few examples.
- They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything.
(Anna Quindlen, "Homeless") - Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world.
(Maya Angelou, "Champion of the World") - If everyone is allowed to take drugs everyone will and the GNP will decrease, the Commies will stop us from making everyone free, and we shall end up a race of zombies, passively murmuring "groovy" to one another. Alarming thought.
(Gore Vidal, "Drugs") - Longing's at the heart of it, I guess. Longing that overtakes me like a fast car on the freeway and makes me willing to withstand a feeling of personal temporariness.
(Richard Ford, "I Must Be Going") - Almost anything can trigger a specific attack of migraine: stress, allergy, fatigue, an abrupt change in barometric pressure, a contretemps over a parking ticket. A flashing light. A fire drill.
(Joan Didion, "In Bed") - "Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors."
(E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake")
But we can do better than that, can't we?
Over 30 years ago, in An Alternate Style: Options in Composition, Winston Weathers made a strong case for going beyond strict definitions of correctness when teaching writing. He argued that students should be exposed to a wide range of styles, including the "variegated, discontinuous, fragmented" forms used by many professional authors.
Perhaps because "fragment" is so commonly equated with "error," Weathers reintroduced the term crot, an archaic word for "bit," to characterize this deliberately chopped-up form.
Similarly, in his revised edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1965), Ernest Gowers replaced "fragment" with the expression verbless sentence:
The verbless sentence is a device for enlivening the written word by approximating it to the spoken. There is nothing new about it. Tacitus, for one, was much given to it. What is new is its vogue with English journalists and other writers. . . .
Since the verbless sentence is freely employed by some good writers (as well as extravagantly by many less good ones) it must be classed as modern English usage. That grammarians might deny it the right to be called a sentence has nothing to do with its merits. It must be judged by its success in affecting the reader in the way the writer intended. Used sparingly and with discrimination, the device can no doubt be an effective medium of emphasis, intimacy, and rhetoric.
As Gowers makes clear, this isn't meant as a defense of all fragments. Incomplete sentences that bore, distract, or confuse readers should be edited and corrected. But there are occasions when fragments (or crots or verbless sentences) work just fine. Indeed, better than fine. To learn more about them, see Using Sentence Fragments Effectively.
SHARE
){kind=link}