An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Three -- Fragments are so

Fragments. I just can't even. I really can't. But you? You could, right?

I'll stop now! It's irritating even me, and I'm the one writing it. But, hopefully, you get the idea: in this chapter, we're talking about sentence fragments.

In order to understand what a sentence fragment is, we need to remind ourselves of a tiny bit of grammar. Don't run away! It's easy, I promise.

According to classical grammar, a sentence contains at least a subject (the thing that the sentence is about, a noun) and a verb (a word that indicates what's happening to the subject). Here's the famous example, which I'm sure you've seen before.

The shark yodelled.

Subject: shark. Verb: yodel. If you want another one, famously, the shortest sentence in the bible is 'Jesus wept' which doesn't even need the 'the'.

Some verbs can be modified so that they can affect a second noun as well, and that second noun is the 'object'. Generally, this means the subject is doing something to the object.

The shark yodelled at the octopus.

Yep, it's a tale as old as the world itself, sharks (noun, subject) yodelling at (verb) octopuses (noun, object). Dammit, when they start, nothing will stop 'em.

By the way, I say 'according to classical grammar', but actually grammar is a bit more permissive: there's a case for various short speech parts to be complete sentences on their own, most famously 'no'. If you Google 'no is a complete sentence' you'll get lots of self-help stuff about boundaries, and some grumpy grammar blogs picking fights. I give no hoots about grammar, so I'm going to ignore all that, and we'll stay with the classical definition of a sentence.

When you omit the verb, the subject, or the object if the verb wanted one (or drop something else in a more complicated sentence), you've made a fragment. Unlike our previous topics, this is less stylistic choice and more skating over the frozen abyss of incorrectness. You know this, because your editing software may put a blue squiggly line under it, with the note 'fragment: consider revising'. So we're going to look at what's OK and what's not, and we'll talk about what you should keep and what you should fix.

So, first off, dialogue. Have you ever read a transcript of normal people talking? Not of a pre-planned, rehearsed speech, but just humans sharing information with other humans using their fleshy breathing holes. It's amazing. It's ungrammatical, it's riddled with repetition and fillers, and most of all, it's all fragments. It's easy to listen to and exhausting to read.

As a result, you can get away with fragments in dialogue.

'I'm not... It's not... Can't you just turn it off and on again?' asked Sheena.

Here, ellipses show that the fragment is caused by speech tailing off. Fragments and ellipses tend to accompany each other, because they help you understand what has been omitted; in this case, our speaker tried to start three sentences and only succeeded at the last one.

Now, as I said, in reality everyone talks like this all the time. However, in text it has a particular meaning: it shows that the speaker is distracted from speaking properly, maybe by pain, irritation or despair. In Sheena's case, it's by a polar bear in a striped one-piece bathing suit holding a photocopier. He's late again. Oh, Colin.

This is OK, but when we use fragments I claim that we make our reader work harder. Our brains can't get full context from the current sentence, so they have to search a bit further afield to make sense of what's going on. I think fragments are well named, because it's almost like when you're cleaning, and you find little shards of glass. Sure, you can sweep them into your dustpan, but let's be a bit careful, because we don't want to cut ourselves, and it slows you down. So, even though transcribed speech is full of fragments, we write full sentences in fiction because that's easier to read. We keep fragments for special occasions.

As usual, where things are acceptable in reported speech, they're also acceptable in a first person point of view.

This wasn't possible. Couldn't be. I'd checked. All the ingredients, every one of them. And yet... And yet. Mrs Miggins was now a vampire. Whoops...

First person dips between narration and inner thoughts, and when you're in the latter, fragments give the same distracted, frantic feel as they do in reported speech. Note how I went pretty light on the ellipses. If you put those three little dots on the end of every fragment I think it looks just horrible.

But, you're paying a cost. I again claim, without any kind of scientific basis, that part of the frantic, stressful feel from fragments is your mind doing extra work. It's exhausting, so you should use them very, very judiciously. Make sure your fragments are punchy and only used at key points, and if they aren't, consider whether you should just make them full sentences, or just delete them.

The above passage contains a fragment type that I personally hate, but I know other people use. This is the noun phrase fragment. Here's another example.

The massive baby.

As you remember, a noun is a word that means a thing or person; a noun phrase is a string of words that can be used wherever a noun can be used, and might simply be a noun on its own. So, in the sentence, 'The alien loves the pink plastic spade', 'the alien' and 'the pink plastic spade' are both noun phrases. You can tell because you can drop some other one word noun phrases in and it makes sense: 'Mike loves Steve'.

Now, a noun phrase is not a sentence, not by any definition of grammar. That means, if you're using noun phrases as fragments, and you're not in anything that can claim to be speech, you're definitely breaking the rules.

I see these used as punchlines. Here's an example, filling out the previous fragment.

There it was, towering over the stadium. The massive baby.

Ugh. Don't you think it's icky? Your mind expects the noun phrase to be followed by a verb and it doesn't, you just sort of catch your finger on the end of the sentence and draw a tiny bit of blood. You don't need the disjointed feel that fragments give you, so why bother? Having said that, enough people do this, that it seems to be a thing.

Fortunately, there is a very simple fix.

There it was, towering over the stadium: the massive baby.

Yes, I know. It feels like you've softened the punchline because you haven't thundered that full stop down. But, c'mon. Grammar exists for a reason. You have to chose between your reader's comfort and your desire for drama.

* * *

And we're done! No cheat sheet this time, because what can you search for? However, this is a good time to tell you to turn on your grammar checker in your editing software, so maybe it can point out when you write fragments, and you can decide if it's worth it or not.

Let me know your fragmented thoughts in the comments!