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Grammar as Rhetoric and Style 5

Short, Simple Sentences and Fragments

Short Simple Sentences Grammar as Rhetoric and Style

A simple sentence, strictly defined, has a subject and verb: it consists of one
independent clause. A simple sentence may have a compound subject, a compound
verb, a modifier, and an object or a complement, but it still is one independent clause.
The following examples of simple sentences appear in Barbara Ehrenreich’s
“Serving in Florida” (p. 000).

There is a problem, though.
But the chances of this are minuscule.

This must be Phillip’s theory, anyway. Finally she tells me not to take her wrong.
What had I been thinking?

Sometimes simple sentences can be rather long:
The e-mails and phone messages addressed to my former self come from a distant race
of people with exotic concerns and far too much time on their hands.
This example from Ehrenreich consists of twenty-eight words.

Sentence Fragments

A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence, often the result of careless writing;
an effective fragment, however, is an incomplete sentence that readers understand to
be complete. Some fragments are missing a subject, a verb, or both; other fragments
have a subject and verb but are dependent clauses. Consider this from Omer Aziz’s
essay “The World 9/11 Took from Us” (p. 00):
When I got home from school, I had questions for my parents: Why had this happened?
Why were people looking at us differently? And did this mean that we were also bad
people because we prayed to the same God as the attackers? Questions that no parent
could adequately answer.

The fragment has neither a subject nor a verb. If we added a subject and verb to make
it a complete sentence, the excerpt might read like this:

When I got home from school, I had questions for my parents: Why had this happened?
Why were people looking at us differently? And did this mean that we were also bad
people because we prayed to the same God as the attackers? These are questions that
no parent could adequately answer.
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