Sentence StructureWhat is the difference between a sentence and a

fragment or a run on?

What is a sentence?

A sentence is a word or word group that contains a subject and a verb and that expresses a complete thought.◦When I saw the snake, I jerked around and

sprinted home.

◦I zigzagged my way through the line.

What is a fragment?

A sentence fragment is a group of words that looks like a sentence but does not contain both a subject and a verb or does not express a complete thought.◦Sailing around the world.

Notice: who is doing the sailing? We are missing a subject.

◦The hike through the Grand Canyon. What about this hike? What is difficult, easy, long,

or fun? We are missing the verb in this fragment.

Correcting fragments

How can you take the following fragments and make them a complete sentence?

◦Sailing around the world.

◦The hike through the Grand Canyon.

Run ons

They just keep running….A run on occurs when you connect two or

more sentences without proper punctuation or conjunctions.

I once had a dog named sally who I loved very much and I wanted to keep her and I was sad when she died and I really miss her I loved her very much.

WHEW!!! TOO MUCH…

Correcting run ons

How can we correct this giant run on sentence? Think- where does one thought end and another thought begin?

I once had a dog named sally who I loved very much and I wanted to keep her and I was sad when she died and I really miss her I loved her very much.

Practice, practice, practice

Workbook pages 1-3