


While I was asleep, the cat knocked over the plant. There are occasions when a sentence fragment can be stylistically effective, exactly what you want and no more.WHO and the WHAT), and in the second example, we need a comma to separate the dependent

In the first example, we need to add the subject and the verb (the To sentence, but it cannot stand alone because there is no subject (the cat) or a > In both of these examples, the dependent clause is “while I was asleep.” It adds information Wrong: While I was asleep the cat knocked over the plant.In the example above, all of those phrases could be considered incomplete sentences if they appeared alone, but I could also form sentence fragments that are not. Maybe it's missing a syntactic element like a subject or verb maybe it doesn't express a complete thought. To a sentence but cannot stand alone as its own sentence.Ĭomplete sentence = Dependent clause, independent clause.Ĭomplete sentence = Independent clause, dependent clause. A sentence fragment is any set of words that don't form a complete sentence. A dependent clause is a clause (or part of a sentence) that adds additional information
