THE SENSATIONAL SENTENCE FRAGMENT: Yes, it often plays a role in good writing. A surprisingly big role.

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A teacher's typical reaction upon spotting a sentence fragment.

       In some circles—especially in junior-high, high-school, and college composition classes—the sentence fragment is treated a little like dog poop on the living room rug. Most teachers wrinkle their noses at the sentence fragment. This is understandable. Students who write unintentional sentence fragments indicate that they don’t know the three essential elements of a standard English sentence: a subject and a verb in an independent clause.

Examples of typical student sentence fragments (underlined):

Fragment: Beatrice leaped into the cave. Even though, Dante was afraid of the dark.

Fragment: Fluffy licking his nether parts and purring loudly while the mouse frolicked.

Fragment: This was all Bruce wanted. To pass organic chemistry.

     Most teachers would recommend that these sentences be corrected something like this:

Correct: Beatrice leaped into the cave, even though Dante was afraid of the dark.

Correct: Fluffy licked his nether parts and purred loudly while the mouse frolicked.

Correct: This was all Bruce wanted: to pass organic chemistry.

     If I were teaching the students who wrote the fragments above, I too would say that they needed to be cleaned up—not because they are fragments, but because they are fragments that don’t work.

     Some fragments do work. And work well. A fragment doesn’t have to be dog poop.

     Below are some pieces of first-rate writing.  Each has at least one fragment at the heart of it. See if you can identify the fragments. Afterward, I’ll talk about how those fragments work.

    

Take my wife. Please.

—joke usually attributed to comedian Henny Youngman.

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 P.M. And stop them.

—from “Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Time magazine, Dec. 5, 2011, p. 47.

A badly or maliciously programmed bot strain might decide not just to clean up a tire dump but to eat the rubber in tires and asphalt tar binder. Everywhere. Or all the cotton. Or polyester, or insulation on electrical wiring, or ‘paper money.’

—from Enough, by Bill McKibben, p. 90 (describing the potential dangers of nano-size robots).

By the same evening he was able to stand with the doctor’s help and let himself be washed. His legs were thin as sticks, and trembling, but the doctor made him walk upon the spot until he was exhausted and overcome by nausea. His ribs hurt more than ever, and he was informed that they would probably be a torment for months, at every inhalation. He should use his stomach muscles to breathe, he was informed, and when he tried it, it hurt the wound in his abdomen. Pelagia fetched a mirror and showed him the livid scar across his face and his incipient and Hellenic beard. It itched and bothered him almost as much as his scars, and it gave him a brigand’s air. “I look like a Sicilian,” he said.

    That night he was fed his first solid meal. Snails.

—from Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres, p. 342

I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

—from “For Esme—with Love and Squalor,” by J.D. Salinger (first page)

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

—from the “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” chapter in Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. . . .

— from The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 345

Henny Youngman said, "I take my wife everywhere. But she keeps coming back."

    

     Let’s start with the first example (I’ll underline the fragments in the examples):

Take my wife. Please.

     Would this famous joke work if it were written “Take my wife, please”? Not very well. It works best with “Please” as a sentence fragment. Let’s analyze how the joke works. (I know, I know: you should never analyze a joke. Indulge me.)

     When you get to the first period, you think that the original statement (“Take my wife”), and hence the original thought, is complete. The period makes you pause, prepared for a new thought—then boom!, with the perfect timing of a good comedian you’re hit with a punch line that you weren’t expecting. That one-word sentence fragment “Please”—the surprise addition—makes it all work.

      One common kind of effective fragment, then, is the “surprise addition” fragment. With the first period, you make your reader think a thought is over—that’s what periods ordinarily tell us—but then you add a fragment that, as a surprise, really finishes the thought. It’s the period that comes before a fragment that sets up the whole effect.

     The Time magazine example works pretty much the same way:

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 P.M. And stop them.

We readers, programmed to expect grown-ups to encourage students to study more, are not prepared for the government employees to make them stop. Putting “And stop them” in a fragment (instead of attaching it to the previous sentence as standard syntax would demand) makes it doubly a surprise. We expect the thought to be ended at the period after “10 P.M.” So, unprepared, we’re surprised when the fragment—and the idea it contains—jumps at us like a friend popping out of a room we thought was empty. (Note: It would be a better surprise if the writer had left out the heavy-handed spoiler “counterintuitive” in the previous sentence.)

      Remember: The period that precedes a fragment acts to lull the reader into complacency. He thinks the idea is finished. He’s ready to leave the room. Then boo!, you jump at him with the surprise fragment that really finishes the idea.

Bill McKibben's book Enough examines the dangers of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

      The Bill McKibben example, from his thought-provoking book Enough, works in a similar but not exactly the same way:

A badly or maliciously programmed bot strain might decide not just to clean up a tire dump but to eat the rubber in tires and asphalt tar binder. Everywhere. Or all the cotton. Or polyester, or insulation on electrical wiring, or ‘paper money.’

     Here the reader thinks it’s bad enough that the insane nanobots (which were programmed just to clear up one pile of rubber tires) go crazy and start eating more nearby tires and even the roads. After the period at the end of the first sentence, we readers relax a bit, digesting a pretty frightening image: crumbling roads, cars with disintegrating tires. But surprise!, the thought is not over. “Everywhere.” This first fragment is the first surprise: It’s not just the tires and roads in one area the nanobots will eat; it’s the tires and roads all over the world. Yipes! It’s worse than we thought. Then, as we think that that thought is finally over (because the thought in English sentences is supposed to be over at the period), we get more: the bots will eat all the cotton, too! Then another added fragment: and they’ll eat all the polyester or all the electrical stuff or even all the money. This paragraph ends with three fragments that build on each other, until finally, shaken out of our period-ends-the-thought contentment by each new fragment, we realize that in a nanobot world (according to McKibben) people will be naked, powerless, and destitute. Everywhere.

     The McKibben example thus illustrates another kind of effective fragment: The “don’t relax yet—it gets even worse” fragment. The thought in English sentences is supposed to be over at the period. But not when you add a fragment.

Louis de Bernieres' novel Corelli's Mandolin is a modern classic. Skip the mediocre movie. Read the great book.

      The example from Louis de Berniere’s beautiful, sweet, romantic, horrifying, and funny novel Correli’s Mandolin works still another way.

By the same evening he was able to stand with the doctor’s help and let himself be washed. His legs were thin as sticks, and trembling, but the doctor made him walk upon the spot until he was exhausted and overcome by nausea. His ribs hurt more than ever, and he was informed that they would probably be a torment for months, at every inhalation. He should use his stomach muscles to breathe, he was informed, and when he tried it, it hurt the wound in his abdomen. Pelagia fetched a mirror and showed him the livid scar across his face and his incipient and Hellenic beard. It itched and bothered him almost as much as his scars, and it gave him a brigand’s air. “I look like a Sicilian,” he said.

    That night he was fed his first solid meal. Snails.

    A consummate, almost classical stylist, de Bernieres has few fragments in his work (unlike Time magazine, which uses them a lot. A lot.). De Berniere’s style runs more toward longish, elegant, compound/complex sentences, like most of those in the first paragraph here. That’s partly why the final sentence fragment—the single word “Snails”—is so effective. That long first paragraph and all those richly worded sentences, filled with details of the injured soldier’s condition, have left us readers almost writhing in pain with him. We are even prepared for more graphic and painful detail. But instead, with an abrupt change of pace, we get a new brief paragraph and a short penultimate sentence: That night he was fed his first solid meal. For a moment we think that’s the end (we don’t really need to know what the meal was, after all) or we imagine, for just the briefest moment (before it registers that there’s another word), a mundane first meal like mashed potatoes or lamb chops or cereal. Or maybe a fancy celebratory meal like steak and cake. Then the surprise, both in style and substance: “Snails.”

     Here the sentence fragment is almost magical. The word “snails” is short and plain, after all, and snails as a food is always a surprise, anyway—doubly so in the context of a badly injured soldier’s first solid meal. “Snails” is so strange that it almost makes one laugh.

     De Bernieres is illustrating some other principles here: Syntax, word choice, content, and context all work together in great writing. A great sentence fragment creates surprise in all those areas. First, a sentence fragment by its very nature violates the rules of standard syntax, especially when a writer has been, till then, using much more complex syntax. That’s the first surprise. (“Syntax,” by the way, is just a fancy word for sentence architecture.) Second, a good sentence fragment uses brief, unexpected words—usually simple ones like “please,” and “everywhere” and “snails.” Third, a good sentence fragment usually surprises by its content: Who would have expected the soldier’s first solid meal to be snails? Fourth, and finally, a good sentence fragment surprises by the context in which it’s placed: long sentences, the almost clinical description of pain and convalescence, followed by . . . snails?

     In this case, the fragment “Snails.” also ends a chapter of the book—a chapter otherwise painful in many ways. It’s a perfect snapped-shut, mood-shifting ending for a chapter.

     Let me say a bit more about this fragment. Some of you might be asking this: Couldn’t de Berneires’ last sentence simply have been rewritten in standard punctuation? Like this:

     That night he was fed his first solid meal: snails.

     Yes, it could have been written that way. But the effect would not quite have been the same, for at least two reasons. First off, the colon would tell the reader instantly to expect a description of the meal. The period does not prepare you for that. That means the colon would have undermined the surprise factor just a bit. And second, leaving “Snails” between periods, like a sentence unto itself, forces the reader to invent the sentence elements (subjects, verbs) and the implications that might go with it. For example: “Of all things, the meal was snails” or “How strange that snails were the meal” or “Surely no one would have expected that the meal would be snails” or “It was a gross meal of snails.” In other words, the special oddness of snails (or, if the previous context of the novel calls for it, the special appropriateness of snails) is emphasized by the fragment far better than it would be if the word simply finished the previous sentence by coming after a colon.

    

J.D. Salinger's short story "For Esme—With Love and Squalor" is one of the great stories of the 20th century.

       The J.D. Salinger quote offers a differ kind of fragment:

I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

     Here, the fragment at the end is not, I think, so much designed to surprise the reader as to reflect the state of mind of the writer/narrator. We will come to learn that the narrator of this famous and moving short story is a soldier psychologically damaged by war. This paragraph, which comes on the first page of the story, helps begin to establish the soldier’s mental state. He’s self-conscious about his writing and its effect (especially on the groom). He’s thoughtful and nostalgic (thinking back six years). He wants to come across as a bit rebellious (he doesn’t care if the groom is upset by what he’s writing; he claims that he wants the groom to be upset). He even claims he’s not trying to please anyone. This is an odd claim. So odd, in fact, that he stops, pauses, and then, almost as if to explain his motives to himself, writes his sentence fragment: “More, really, to edify, to instruct.” Here, once again, the period before the fragment is the key: It is the pause during which the writer himself literally stops to think. He wants to consider what he is about to say. He wants, in fact, to consider, or reconsider, his purpose in writing. The fragment is his syntactically stumbling attempt to do that. (Note how chopped up the fragment is by commas.)

     A fragment, then, surrounded as it is by periods, can indicate that a writer’s (or narrator's) progress has been put on pause. It can give the impression of a writer stepping back, gathering himself, and mulling things over before he moves on. Perhaps even searching his soul a bit.

Henry David Thoreau knew the power of the sentence fragment.

      If Salinger’s sentence fragment reflects the narrator’s self-consciousness and tentativeness, Thoreau’s does just the opposite. It is a self-confident and assertive shout-out in the middle of a paragraph.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

     Here the fragment—“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”—bursts out as if the writer simply could not contain himself any longer within the strictures of standard English grammar. And of course, such a fragment also does what most sentence fragments do: It gives extra emphasis to the idea within the fragment. It’s like putting it on a billboard in the middle of an otherwise empty field.

    (Question for students: Later in the paragraph, Thoreau writes, "Simplify, simplify." This is not a fragment. Why not?)

Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible looks at missionary life in Africa.

     Finally, we have the long paragraph from Barbara Kingsolver’s spectacular and profound novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. . . .

     This excerpt illustrates, finally, one other use for sentence fragments: They speed the prose along, often with an intentional unruliness. More particularly, they can help generate scenes of hurry, tumult, even chaos. Here Kingsolver is describing a nighttime hunt-by-fire in Africa, the fire being used to flush out animals. The narrator is a child, for whom the scene is new and confusing. The sentence fragments, usually lacking the verbs that would make them complete sentences, come at us like sudden fire-lit images. It’s almost as if the writer is too rushed or overwhelmed to fill in the verbs. Syntactically unregulated themselves, such fragments mirror the disorder at the heart of a scene like this.

     

      So. Sentence fragments. Not dog poop at all. Rare gems, instead.