It's obvious that a sentence needs a verb. But respected authors and well-educated writers have always used exceptions to the 'rule' for good effect. This 'rule' has some validity as a general guideline, especially to help adolescents get over some of their more atrocious writing habits. What is a sentence fragment? Anything that looks like a sentence - starts with a capital letter and ends with a period - but is not a syntactically complete standard sentence. One is 'No sentence fragments!'Īctually, that should be 'Don't use sentence fragments!' so as not to break its own rule. There are a few rules that are drummed so incessantly into our heads in school that we cannot help but internalize them.
This article originally appeared on TheWeek.
