Fragments

Much of the ACT English section requires you to determine what is a complete sentence and what is a fragment. It requires that you are able to juggle several skills, including correctly using commas, semicolons, colons, clauses, and various other things.

A complete sentence needs two things:

1. A subject-verb set
2. A complete sentence expression

A subject-verb set simply means that you need a primary noun (subject) and something for that noun to do (verb). They have to go together. As discussed elsewhere, they are, in some ways, defined by each other.

The dog wondered about its future, looking at the vet clinic.

Start with the verb. You may start with “looking” since that kind of sticks out as an action. So we ask ourselves:

“Does something in the sentence “look”? Does the sentence say the “dog looked”?

Not really. “Dog looking” doesn’t work. Maybe that’s not our verb. The sentence says that the dog did what?

The dog wondered. Actually, “wondered” is an action. Now we have our correct subject-verb set: dog-wondered.

Second, does it express a complete thought? Sure. We know that the dog wondered, what it wondered about, and why. It’s a complete sentence.

Let’s look at another.

Which he didn’t fully understand.

“Understand” seems to be an action. Did someone or something “understand”? Yep! Looks like “he” did. In fact, since “did” is a helping verb, our full subject-verb set here is “he did understand.”

What about a complete thought? Which he didn’t fully understand. Note that the word “which” keeps this from expressing a complete thought. It appears to call back to something that was just talked about, but… we don’t know what. “Which” has to have something to refer to, and this one doesn’t. Look at the following examples, each of which has a word like “which” that keeps it from expressing a complete thought.

• After he had gone to the store for milk
• Because what her boss told her was obviously incorrect
• That they looked forward to the evening.

Other sentences are fragments because they don’t have a proper subject-verb set. These are phrases instead of clauses or sentences:

• Working tirelessly every single day
• Another example of the statistic
• To win the day despite the challenge

Look at the first bullet point above.

“Working” appears to be an action, a potential verb. Notice, though, that there’s no subject, nothing to actually do the “working.” Thus, there is no subject-verb set.

Example

Now, let’s look at an example of this as it will appear on the ACT.

Scientists analyzed the patterns revealed by the study since it would apply to other situations.

A. NO CHANGE
B. study, since
C. study; since
D. study. Since

Take a stab at it and see if you can answer the question correctly.

Do you know the answer:

Whether you answered the question correctly or not, keep reading! It’s important that you understand exactly why each wrong answer is incorrect and why only one is correct.

This looks, on the surface, like a punctuation question, and it is. Behind the punctuation, though, there’s the matter of fragments and complete sentences.

Option D, in particular, highlights this. If we put a period there, we make both clauses complete sentences. The first clause, “Scientists analyzed the patterns revealed by the study,” fits the bill: it has a subject-verb set (scientists-analyzed) and expresses a complete thought. The second clause, “since it would apply to other situations” also has a subject-verb set (it-would apply), but doesn’t express a complete thought. The word “since” at the beginning means that it needs fulfillment of some kind, specifically, another independent clause (or complete sentence) attached to it.

Choice C might be tempting if we have forgotten that semicolons only link independent clauses (or complete sentences). Since what comes after the semicolon isn’t a complete sentence as stated above, the semicolon doesn’t work.

Additionally, no comma is needed as in choice B. This is because when you have an independent clause and a dependent clause in one sentence, you only need a comma if the dependent clause goes first. See the chapter Linking dependent clauses.

Choice A is our correct answer.

Preparing for sentence fragment questions on the ACT

The test quizzes you on sentence fragments A TON! So, we added a few more questions than usual. You’ll want to make sure you drill these questions plenty so that you’ll knock this out of the park on test day.