VA ClassesWhat Makes a Sentence, and What Does Not
A capital letter at the front and a full stop at the end prove nothing. Plenty of things are punctuated like sentences and are not sentences, and children write them constantly, usually because the fragment sounded finished when they said it out loud.
The two parts
A sentence needs somebody or something, and it needs that somebody to be doing something. Then it has to finish.
Two of those three are easy to teach and children pick them up quickly. The third is where the marks go, because a group of words can have both parts and still leave the reader waiting, and nothing about the way it is punctuated will warn them.
The gold part is the subject, and you find it by asking who or what the sentence is about. The blue part is the verb, which answers what the subject does, did, or is. Both colours carry the same meaning here that they carried on the nouns and verbs page, because the subject of a sentence is nearly always a noun doing the most important job a noun ever does.
The two-part test. Who or what? And what do they do? If you cannot answer both from the words in front of you, it is not a sentence yet.
The trap: Because
Now the part that catches almost everybody.
Because the dog barked. There is a subject, the dog, and there is a verb, barked, and the whole thing opens with a capital and closes with a full stop, so every rule a child has been taught about sentences is satisfied. It is still a fragment. The word Because promises that something else is coming, nothing comes, and the reader is left holding a question the writer never answered. Because the dog barked, what happened?
Words like this are worth knowing by sight. Because, although, when, if, while, since, after, before, unless, until. Any one of them at the front of a group of words turns that group into half of a sentence, and the other half has to be written or the whole thing collapses, which is why a child who has just learned to use Because often starts producing fragments they never used to write.
The out-loud test. Read it to somebody and watch their face. If they look like they are waiting, you have written half a sentence. This works better than any rule, because the waiting is exactly what the fragment does to a reader.
Spotting a fragment
Three fragments below, and each one is missing a different thing. The dashed box is where the missing part should have gone.
Fragments are not carelessness. They are how people actually speak, and speech gets away with it because the rest of the meaning arrives in a tone of voice, a shrug, or the sentence somebody said thirty seconds earlier. Writing has none of that. So a child who writes Running down the street. has not forgotten a rule, they have written down what they would have said, and the fix is to notice that the page is a harder audience than a person.
A long group of words is not more likely to be a sentence. The tall boy in the red coat standing by the gate near the shops. That is fifteen words and it is still a fragment. Length feels like completeness and is not related to it at all.
Worked examples
Is this a sentence? The old bridge across the river.
- Read it and ask who or what it is about.
- The bridge. That is the subject, so one part is there.
- Ask what the bridge does. Read every word again looking only for that.
- Nothing. Across the river tells you where it is, not what it does.
Not a sentence. It has no verb.
Is this a sentence? Because she missed the bus.
- It has a capital and a full stop, which prove nothing either way.
- Subject: she.
- Verb: missed. Both parts are present.
- But Because promises a second half, and none arrives.
Not a sentence. It needs the half that Because was pointing at, for example: Because she missed the bus, she was late.
Turn this fragment into a sentence: The tall boy in the red coat.
- Run the test. Who or what? The boy. So the subject is there.
- What does he do? Nothing is said, so the verb is what is missing.
- Add one. Anything he does will work, so pick something real.
- The tall boy in the red coat waved at us.
The tall boy in the red coat waved at us.
Common mistakes
Trusting the full stop
A child checks that a capital and a full stop are there, sees both, and moves on. Punctuation is put on by the writer, so it can only ever confirm what the writer already believed. It is not evidence. The test has to be about the words.
Joining two sentences with a comma
It was raining, we stayed inside. Both halves are complete sentences, which is precisely the problem, because a comma is not strong enough to hold two of those together. Use a full stop, or add a joining word: It was raining, so we stayed inside.
Thinking an -ing word is the verb
The children running in the park. Running looks like a verb and is doing a different job here, describing the children. Say the words out loud with the subject and you will hear that nothing has happened yet. The children were running in the park fixes it, and the word that fixed it is were.
Practice questions
Seven questions. One attempt each, and the explanation appears once the answer is in.
Check yourself
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What to learn next
For parents. Take any four sentences from the book your child is reading tonight and cover the second half of one of them, so it reads like a fragment. Ask what is missing. Hearing the gap in somebody else's writing is much easier than finding it in your own, and it is the same skill.
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