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The Twenty Most Common Errors


Sitting cannot function alone as the verb of the sentence. Adding the auxiliary verb was turns it into a complete verb, was sitting, indicating continuing action. Now this is a sentence.




A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a whole sentence, with a capital letter at the beginning and a period, question mark, or an exclamation point at the end. A fragment may lack a subject, a complete verb, or both, a fragment may depend for its meaning on the sentence before it. Check your draft for sentence fragments by reading it out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence. Out of normal order, sentence fragments stand out clearly.