Mending the Fragmented Free Modifier

Abstract

When the subject of fragments crops up in the composition classroom, teachers often follow a standard instructional route offered in many textbooks. That is, they begin by explaining the basic requirements of a complete sentence, the subject and predicate. Then, perhaps, they assign exercises which help students to distinguish between sentences and those sentence-level errors which, as most students know, can incur inordinately heavy penalties. Fragments are indeed costly mistakes in freshman themes, and some instructors can even quantify the cost. No paper can get a passing grade if it has more than three fragments, or each lowers the grade one letter, and so on. However, as I intend to demonstrate, lumping all varieties of fragments together in this manner is both an overly harsh and also a potentially destructive reaction. Moreover, the usual instructional sequence for remedying as suggested above, is a particularly ineffective way to proceed because the fragment label is at best a blanket term for several kinds of sentence errors that ought not to be equated. Further, if we don't make distinctions among the various kinds of incomplete sentences and don't offer appropriately different instruction, we may well be inhibiting the development of a late-blooming syntactic structure in student writing, a structure regarded by Francis Christensen and others as characteristic of mature writing. However, before we can proceed, it is necessary first to differentiate among the varieties of fragments that exist. Although a great deal of work remains to be done, particularly in analyzing the types of fragments produced by student writers at various stages of their development, Charles R. Kline, Jr., and W. Dean Memering have already identified several kinds which appear in published prose, in their study, Formal Fragments: The English Minor Sentence, Research in the Teaching of English, 11 (Fall, 1977), 97-110. One variety not found in formal writing is the broken sentence, described by