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FRAGMENTS EXAMPLES SERIES

Thick, black, slanted upwards, an oblique line across her skin. Pale green without a touch of hazel, bristly black lashes, slightly tilted at the ends. French, her mother: delicate, Coast aristocrat. Rewritten, first paragraph of Gone with the Wind. The sense of the story is lost and the reader is confused.Īpologies, Miss Scarlett: Overused Fragments, an Example.Giving each fragment it’s own paragraphing only to spread out a section, not for a better reason.In repetitive use, fragments run out of energy.Lazy uses, where complete sentences would deliver greater force or elegance.Overuse, rendering them monotonous, ludicrous and ultimately unbearable.Spunk & Bite emphasizes some of the pitfalls of using fragments: Checking my phone, here’s some fragments recently used: Texting and email have tended to emphasize the sentence fragment because it shortens the time to type a message. to omit repetitions, such as “There is.”īut fragments can be overused, especially in certain situations.emphasize urgency with quick, breathless utterances.emphasize importance by withdrawing support or detraction of other words.voice and tone demand omission and truncation.

FRAGMENTS EXAMPLES SERIES

savoring a series of facts, scraps of info.

heightened information and emotional intensity.

There are many reasons to use a series of short sentences, possibly including fragments:

Does the fragment serve to emphasize important information–information that warrants it’s own sentence?ĭoes use of fragments add rhythmical interest or help establish an interesting voice?.

Can reader supply words or borrow sense from the sentence before it to make the fragment whole? Usually, it is a modifying detail or a reinforcing imagery.

Test the Effectiveness of Your Sentence Fragment Hickey says that effective sentence fragments A) follows logically from sentence before and B) forms coherent, complete thought, even if grammatically, the sentence is incomplete. In her book, Developing a Written Voice, Dona J. The tone, the purpose, the voice–these demand a livelier sentence structures, including the intentional fragment.Ī sentence fragment is one which doesn’t contain both a subject and a verb. Those are formal environments, requiring formal ways of communicating, which means grammatically correct sentences.īut good journalism and especially good fiction are more colloquial and informal. Fragments are frowned upon in the academic and business worlds, for good reasons. Fragments can and should be part of your fiction writing. It’s refreshing to see someone speak about sentences in a practical and real-world manner. One commenter asked for more information on sentence fragments.Īrthur Plotnik, author of Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to a Bold Contemporary Style makes this startling statement: “Fragments are a natural and common form of speech, whether in narration or dialogue.” (Chapter 20) Last week, I recommended a summer exercise to play with sentence structures.