Gramergirl here. Today's topic is sentence fragments. I often imagine that listeners are

writing long things, such as articles, essays, and books. But I was recently reminded that

some people make their living writing shorter things, such as headlines and ad copy.

And the keeping thing short is hard work. I didn't have time to write a short letter,

so I wrote a long one instead. That's a famous quotation attributed to many people, including

Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal, that resonates with many people who write for a living. Unfortunately,

when writers focus too much on brevity, sometimes they leave out important words, and produce

fragments instead of sentences.

Entering stage left, we have a new podcast character.

Welcome Sir Freigelot. Sir Freigelot flounces around the countryside, shouting sentence

fragments at unsuspecting strangers. Over the next hill, a tree with wings on DVD, December

19th.

Oh dear, poor Sir Freigelot doesn't know that you can't magically make any set of words

a sentence by starting with a capital letter and ending with a period or an exclamation

point. In the most basic form, a complete sentence must have a subject and a verb.

No Sir Freigelot, you don't have a subject and a verb. It would be, I am leaving town,

or he is leaving town. A verb is an action word that tells your reader what's happening,

and a subject usually does the action of the verb. You can make a complete sentence with

just two words, squiggly hurried. Squiggly, our beloved snail, is the subject, and hurried

is the verb.

No Sir Freigelot, it would be squiggly hurried onward. Squiggly is the subject. He is

the one hurrying. There's even a sentence form called the imperative that lets you make

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