SENTENCE FRAGMENTS

Quite a lot of errors in English are made with dependent clauses. When these are used with NO INDEPENDENT CLAUSE to support them, they become SENTENCE FRAGMENTS.

When the verb is not conjugated to concord with a subject, there is no sentence idea, but rather a FRAGMENTED IDEA, that is, a SENTENCE FRAGMENT.

e.g. SHAKESPEARE HAVING PUBLISHED HIS FIRST PLAY.
- “Shakespeare” is the subject
- “having published” is not a conjugated idea, therefore, this is a SENTENCE FRAGMENT.

A mechanism you can use to check if the verb is conjugated to concord with the verb is to simplify the two parts.
- “Shakespeare” can be changed to the pronoun “I”, and “having published” can be changed to the verb “speak”. For this to work, you must maintain the same form for the verb, that is, “speaking”.
- “Shakespeare having” = “I speaking” - It is easy to see that this is NOT A SENTENCE in English, because the verb is not conjugated to concord with the subject. Thus, you can verify if subjects that appear to have a verb really have one.

There are two ways to correct the error (sentence fragment) above:
- “Shakespeare published his first play” - alter the verb to concord with the subject;
- “Shakespeare, having published his first play, became a household name” - use the sentence fragment as a dependent clause and write a different main clause, thus making this a complex sentence.