CLASSIFYING BY PURPOSE

Sentencing Guidelines: Building Sentences with Clauses

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Why were you looking for your bike?

Because I needed it.

Usually no one objects, or even notices. In careful writing, however, we should avoid fragments unless we’re deliberately using them for emphasis. Even then, we should use them with restraint.

What if we combine two fragments? Do two fragments make a whole? The following consists of two subordinate clauses, punctuated like a complete sentence:

When he finally arrives, if the plane is on time.

Combining two (or more) dependent clauses still makes a fragment sentence, because a sentence has to have at least one independent clause. This kind of fragment is never acceptable, unless you’re Gertrude Stein, and you probably aren’t. (If you are, get in touch with us immediately.)

How can these things keep happening?

Do things like this ever happen to you?

As the third example above shows, many questions (those that can be answered by yes or no) can be formed from declarative sentences by altering the placement of verb. An auxiliary verb (like do) is placed before the subject:

You know what I’m talking about.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

Sometimes, especially in conversation and fictional dialogue, interrogatives are just a word or two that make sense in context (we hope):

What? Why?

Who, me?

Interrogatives can also be statements that end in tag questions:

You did forget your textbooks, didn’t you?

I won’t need them, will I?

These two examples above are not run-on sentences or comma splices. They are correct, completely acceptable sentences, and they’re a bit more complicated than they might look.

As you see in the two examples, a tag question is added to the end of a declarative sentence with a comma, and it repeats the auxiliary verb and the subject of the declarative. If the declarative is positive (You did forget your textbooks), the tag question is negative (didn’t you?). If the declarative is negative (I won’t need them), the tag is positive (will I?).

In other words, negative tag questions anticipate positive answers:

Sentencing Guidelines: Building Sentences with Clauses

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You forgot your textbooks, didn’t you?

Oh—yes, I did.

And positive tag questions anticipate negative answers:

I won’t need them, will I?

No, you won’t.

But we don’t always get the answer we anticipate, do we? (Or, as the great Fats Waller often said: “One never knows, do one?”)

An imperative sentence is a command. It may end with a period or an exclamation mark, and it may be missing the subject:

Get out of here!

Go!

Scram!

Get lost!

In an imperative sentence, the missing subject is often an implied second-person pronoun (you) perhaps with an implied auxiliary verb:

[You must] Get out of here!

[You must] Stop that!

Commands can be phrased more politely, but they’re still imperatives:

Please don’t do that.

Exclamatory sentences express strong emotion. They have no distinctive structure or end punctuation, and they’re often incomplete sentences or just a phrase:

No!

Don’t!

Oh, that’s just great What the heck?

The four classifications that we just examined illustrate how inadequate simple terms and concepts sometimes are in analyzing what language can do. In some cases, because language is capable of explicit and implicit meanings, sentences don’t clearly fit in any single category; they may have implicit meanings quite different from their explicit purpose.

Suppose a teacher in a classroom says to a student, You look puzzled.

In that context, this declarative sentence may contain an implicit interrogative: Do you have a question?

Or suppose the teacher says to a student in the back row, I’m watching you.

That could be an implicit imperative, meaning Stop what you’re doing! Behave yourself!

The teacher might imply the same imperative idea with a question: Did you have something to say?

POINTS FOR WRITERS

1. Beginning sentences with conjunctions.

You may have learned in school that writers should not begin a sentence with the subordinating conjunction because, like this:

Because Linda was late for school, she left home hastily.

Sentencing Guidelines: Building Sentences with Clauses

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In fact, that is a perfectly good complex sentence, and good writers do indeed begin sentences with because. But you shouldn’t do this:

WRONG: Because Linda was late for school. She left home hastily.

As we saw earlier, a subordinate clause has to be connected to an independent clause unless you’re deliberately writing a fragment.

You can also begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions, but don’t overdo it. We’ve done it twice in the last page or so:

But you shouldn’t do this.

And, even then, we should use them with restraint.

The initial conjunction connects the idea of the sentence to the preceding sentences—it’s one way to create paragraph coherence. It also contributes to a somewhat less formal tone, which is desirable in some contexts.

A sentence that begins with a coordinating conjunction is not a fragment sentence. It is a stylistic variation that you should use with restraint.

2. Commas in compound structures.

When a sentence contains a compound phrase of two parts, commas are usually not necessary:

My brother and your sister are planning a party.

When there are three or more parts in the compound structure, we typically use only one conjunction to join them all, and commas separate the parts:

My brother, your sister, and their friends are planning a party.

As you may have noticed in the examples earlier, compound sentences use a comma to mark the end of every independent clause except the last:

Now you’re behaving yourself, but you have to leave anyway.

You’re behaving yourself now, yet you have to leave, and you can’t come back.

When the two clauses are short and simple, we can omit the comma:

I am angry and I am leaving.

When the clauses are long and complex, the commas separating the clauses become more important. They help the reader understand where one clause begins and another ends.

When a subordinate clause begins the sentence, the comma separates the subordinate clause from the independent clause, unless the subordinate clause is brief and the sentence is unambiguous without the comma: