'Rules' for Making Effective Sentence FragmentsĮre are a few suggested rules for making effective sentence fragments:.

(Nicholas Visser, Handbook for Writers of Essays & Theses, 2nd ed. Be alert to the possibility of sentence fragments, and eliminate any that are likely to strike readers as errors rather than as deliberate and effective rhetorical devices.' The unintended fragment is another matter. When Winston Churchill recounted Hitler's boast that Britain was a chicken whose neck he would quickly wring, and then ended his account with the sentence fragment: 'Some chicken, some neck!' he demonstrated just how effective the deliberate use of an incomplete sentence can be. 'Bear in mind that a sentence fragment is successful only when it is clear to the reader that it has been used deliberately.

Deliberate and Unintended Sentence Fragments.

Those pink rattlesnakes down in The Canyon, those diamondback monsters thick as a truck driver's wrist that lurk in shady places along the trail, those unpleasant solpugids and unnecessary Jerusalem crickets that scurry on dirty claws across your face at night. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes slowly evaporating under a scum of grease, full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes, and down at the bottom, inevitably, the pale cadaver of a ten-inch centipede.

'Anyway-why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long.

(Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, 1926) A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches.' Perhaps the greengrocer's mother lived in the country. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. 'Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages.(Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A boyfriend who lifts heavy things for a living. Not just a boyfriend, but a good man, too.

'But she looked like she had a boyfriend.

Sentence fragment definition