Abandon "A Sentence Is a Complete Thought"

A typical, traditional way of teaching about clauses, primarily in order to get students to avoid writing fragments or run-ons (also known as comma splices), offers the notion that sentences are complete thoughts, while fragments are incomplete thoughts. The definition from Springboard, which is in turn taken from The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue University, is the following:

“An independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and verb and expresses a complete thought” (357).

As I’ve written before (here) it’s time to do away with this “complete thought” quip. This shortcut to a real description of fragments and clauses can lead writers to doubt their intuitions; that is, it is important for students to recognize that fragments occur naturally and appropriately in speech, often in writing, and that they are a feature of all languages. Fragments serve as useful rhetorical devices; they appear quite commonly, not only in fiction, but also in more formal work. (Schuster (2006), has a great article which challenges the idea that students should be taught to avoid all sentence fragments; in it, he examines 50 essays in The Best American Essays 2001, finding them chock full of fragments. He writes, “In every case, the fragments express the same idea as the sentences and do so in fewer words – significantly fewer, in several cases. In every case, too, the fragments are more emphatic…Thirdly, the fragments are almost always more natural, more like conversational English…On the basis of this evidence, we might ask the question: Can one be in favor of economy of wording, emphasis, and naturalness of expression and be against the use of sentence fragments?” (79). And another shout-out to Schuster - he has a great article "Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules", also published in English Journal in 2011 that deals not only with fragments, but with "flouting" of other admonitions, including avoid passive, avoid be, and do not begin with conjunctions. Read it.)

Fragments function, both in speech and writing, to introduce new information; the old, or understood, information does not need to be stated. Consider the dialogue between speaker A and speaker B, with the fragments in B's replies.

A. Where are you going?
B. To the bank.

A. She probably should wear a painting smock.
B. Yeah, because those are nice clothes.

Such replies are, of course, perfectly normal and acceptable ways to speak. And the fragment replies in the B examples are certainly complete thoughts. Understanding how fragments function and that they are a natural feature of language helps student realize why they might write in fragments, and to understand and appreciate one of the differences between spoken and more formal varieties of written language.

But if you want your students to avoid them, then having each sentence have a subject is key, and I’ve written about that here and here and here.