When reading a piece of writing, you will sometimes comes across sentence fragments, statements that are written out like a sentence, but are usually missing a crucial component. Most good English grammar software can capably catch such errors, although it’s quite easy to prevent them from occurring in the first place.
There are common, identifiable causes for all types of sentence fragments. Because of that, they can be easily recognized, picked out and subsequently corrected.
Words that end in “-ing” are not definite verbs and cannot stand by themselves. As such, they always require a helping verb (such as “am,” “are,” “be,” “been,” “is,” “was” and “were”) and a subject in order to form a complete sentence. “The dog eating” is a sentence fragment that can be corrected by saying, “The dog is eating.”
Infinitives, which consists of “to” and the base form of a verb, cannot stand alone as the main verb of a sentence. You will need to use a definite verb to complete it. “The man to make it happen” is not a complete sentence, which can easily be fixed by correcting as “The man to make it happen is here.”
Subordinators can be a frequent cause of sentence fragments, because they force one part of a sentence to be dependent on another. These include words like “if,” “before,” “although,” “while” and other similar terms.
Some people make the mistake of using explanatory phrases as an actual sentence. Anytime you’re stating a sentence with “such as,” you’re likely committing this mistake.
