Here’s what the dialogue would look like if you “fixed” the fragments:Ĭolin slowed as he approached a stop sign and then looked at her. In fact, the sentence fragments make the dialogue feel natural, like two real teenagers are actually talking. The context keeps the meaning of every sentence clear. “Sorry,” he said.Ĭolin brought the car to a full stop twenty feet in front of the stop sign and said, “Are you sure?”Įven though there are four sentence fragments in these five lines of dialogue, the reader is never lost. Take a look at this example from John Green’s novel An Abundance of Katherines:Ĭolin slowed as he approached a stop sign and then looked at her. It allows us to skip repeating information that’s already been established. In spoken language, we use sentence fragments all the time as a communication shortcut. The best way to make written dialogue feel like spoken language is to use a couple speech characteristics while still keeping the sentences clear and direct. Even if it’s easy to listen to conversations, the direct transcriptions are usually hard to read. Words, grammatical errors, and abandoned sentence fragments. Transcribe spoken dialogue word-for-word, you’ll discover a plethora of filler If you’re friend’s confused, you’ll need to do some tweaking. When you’re unsure, ask a friend to read the paragraph with the fragment. An intentional sentence fragment does not work when it leaves your audience confused. The one caveat with fragments is that the intended meaning always needs to be clear. But used carefully in creative contexts, sentence fragments can create some wonderful artistic effects. In formal contexts, sentence fragments are straight up inappropriate. These actions don’t require an acted-upon object to make sense, so they’re not considered fragments. For example, the rose blossomed, then it died. Note though that some actions (predicates) don’t require an object to be a complete idea. Unless you’re writing something extremely experimental, your artistic goal shouldn’t be irritated confusion. Without a clear context, sentence fragments will make your reader confused and irritated.
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