2. What is an independent
clause?
• An independent clause is a group of words that:
• Has a subject and a verb
• (ex: The dog ran away.)
• Can stand on its own (in other words, it contains a complete
thought)
• In the example above, we know who is doing the action (the dog)
and what the action is (running away). We don’t have any
questions.
• If, on the other hand, the group of words had been “After the dog
ran away” we wouldn’t have had a complete thought, right?
3. Error 1: Sentence
fragments
• Tip: read through WCS pp 17-24, for a refresher about the subject and predicate, the fundamental halves
of any sentence.
• A sentence fragment results from a failure to meet one or both of the
requirements for an independent clause:
• The group of words is missing either a subject or a verb (or both!).
• Ex. The dog running down the street. what’s missing? VERB
• Ex. The frightened boy’s face was frozen. Drained of all color. what’s missing in the
second group of words? SUBJECT
• The group of words can’t stand on its own—it doesn’t contain the complete thought.
• Ex. Drained of all color. Because of the missing subject, this is not a complete
thought…without the previous sentence, we don’t know what has been drained of color.
The same thing happens with missing verbs.
• Ex. After the boy dropped the dog’s leash. Because we’ve added after to this group of
words, we’ve turned an independent clause into a dependent clause…now we need another
group of words to complete the meaning, right? So this group of words can’t stand on its
own.
4. How do you fix sentence
fragments?
• Simple: You either
• Provide the missing subject, verb, or both:
• The dog running down the street The dog ran down the street. Running
isn’t actually functioning as a verb, so we change the conjugation so that we
are using a true verb.
• The frightened boy’s face was frozen, drained of all color. We’ve changed the
punctuation, so that now the second group of words is a phrase modifying the
word face.
• OR: The frightened boy’s face was frozen. His face drained of all color. This works,
too. We’ve simply added a subject to the second group of words.
• Complete the thought:
• If the thought is incomplete because of a subordinating conjunction, you can
• a) remove that subordinating conjuction: After the boy dropped the leash.
The boy dropped the leash.
• OR b) finish the thought: After the boy dropped the leash, the dog ran away.
What you’ve done here is to join your dependent clause to an independent
clause (The dog ran away.)
5. Some common
subordinating
conjunctions:
After Although As Because Before
Even if Even though How If In order to
Once Provided that Rather than Since So that
Than That Though 'Til, Till Unless
Until When Whenever Where Whereas
Wherever Whether Which While Why
