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the following passage criticizing England's participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714):
After ten years' fighting to little purpose, after the loss of above a hundred thousand men, and a debt remaining of twenty millions, we at length hearkened to the terms of peace, which was concluded with great advantage to the empire and to Holland, but none at all to us, and clogged soon after with the famous treaty of partition.
Allowed a broad and uncritical meaning of "idea," we may say that Swift's sentence contains nine of them: (1) the "ten years' fighting"; (2) the "little purpose," or lack of result; (3) the "loss" of the men; (4) the "debt remaining"; (5) the "hear- kening" to peace; (6) the conclusion of the peace; (7) the "ad- vantages" that followed for England's allies; (8) the absence of such advantages for England herself; and (9) the "clogging"
of the peace. Here the order of the sentence mirrors events.
In reality, as in the sentence, the fighting comes first, then the absence of positive results, the loss of life, the debt, and so on. Effecting a workable compromise between the natural or- der of thought or of events on the one hand, and the gram- matical order of the sentence on the other, is one of the most difficult tasks a writer faces. When you are dealing with a long and complicated subject, the centered sentence may prove the easiest solution to the problem.
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how, when they are a fault rather than a virtue, they may be corrected.
As an instance of a single-word fragment, consider this an- swer to a question:
Do you understand?
Perfectly.
If we were to see the word perfectly printed all by itself, we should be puzzled. We know what the word means, but com- pletely isolated it makes no sense. It is not grammatically meaningful. Of course we rarely encounter words in such utter isolation. Usually they occur in the context of other words (or of clarifying social situations), and we can easily supply what is needed to complete the meaning:
[I understand] perfectly.
Fragments in composition are less likely to be single words than phrases or clauses, usually modifiers detached from the words they modify. Three very common cases are the parti- cipial phrase, the adjectival clause, and the adverbial clause;
each is italicized in the examples below:
DETACHED PARTICIPIAL PHRASE: I saw her. Going down the street.
DETACHED ADJECTIVAL CLAUSE: Everyone left except John. Who decided to stay.
DETACHED ADVERBIAL CLAUSE: It was very late. When the party broke up.
Awkward fragments such as these can be fixed in one of two ways. Either the fragment may be made part of the sentence where it acts as a modifier:
I saw her going down the street.
Everyone left except John, who decided to stay.
It was very late when the party broke up.
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Or, the fragment may be kept as a separate statement but made grammatically complete, either by removing the word or words which render it subordinate or by supplying, if nec- essary, a subject and verb:
I saw her. She was going down the street.
Everyone left except John. He decided to stay.
It was very late. The party broke up.
Though these alternative corrections result in grammatical sentences, they have slight differences in meaning. ("Slight"
differences in meaning are often the difference between good and mediocre writing.) Turning the fragment into a complete sentence gives it more emphasis.
A final type of fragment is the verbless statement:
All people, whether they live in the city or the country.
Here modifiers surround a noun ("people"). But this noun, presumably the intended subject of a sentence, has no verb;
the writer never predicates anything about "people." Cases like this may require more extensive revision. Sometimes, if the noun is followed by a modifying clause, the verb of the clause may be adapted as the main verb:
All people live in the city or the country.
In this instance, the correction is too simpleminded to be what the writer intended. He or she needs to think out the idea and supply an appropriate predication, perhaps something like:
All people, whether they live in the city or the country, want the conveniences of modern life.
Effective Fragments
Fragments are very likely to be awkward and unclear when they are unintended, the result of carelessness or uncertainty
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about what a grammatical sentence is. But used skillfully, they are eye-catching, unusual, and emphatic:
" M a n y a m a n , " said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realized in Hitler's totalitarian system." A l - most, but not quite. Aldous Huxley Sweeping criticism of this type—like much other criticism—throws less light on the subject than on the critic himself. A light not always impressive. F. L Lucas
Obviously, the effectiveness of fragments like these de- pends upon their being uncommon. It is best, then, to employ fragments very occasionally in formal composition, and only when you wish to draw attention to the idea they express.
For Practice
\> Which of the following statements are fragments? Revise them in two ways: first by turning the fragment into a grammatically com- plete sentence in its own right, and second by incorporating it into a sentence within which it serves as a modifier:
1. In the morning when the sun came up. The party broke camp.
2. Most people are honest. Making an effort, for example, to find the owner of a wallet they picked up on a busy street.
3. That girl is very nice. The one you introduced me to.
4. School is not so difficult. If you don't let your work pile up.
5. Not everyone likes football. My brother, for instance.
6. Older people who lived through the Depression and the Second World War. And experienced great changes in our society.
7. The boy climbing the tree. That's my cousin.
8. Although he wasn't at fault. Everybody blamed him.
9. That man running down the street. He stole this lady's purse.
CHAPTER
20
The Well-Written Sentence:
(1) Concision
Aside from being grammatical, a well-written sentence must be clear and interesting. Clarity means that it says to the reader what the writer intended to say; interesting, that it reads well, attracting us by its economy, novelty, sound, and rhythm. To a considerable degree these virtues are a matter of diction, that is, of word choice; and in the section on dic- tion we shall look at them again from that point of view. But they also depend on sentence structure. In this chapter and the next we consider how sentence structure in itself contrib- utes to clarity and interest. It does so by aiming at concision, emphasis, rhythm, and variety.
Concision is brevity relative to purpose. It is not to be con- fused with absolute brevity. A sentence of seven words is brief; but if the idea can be conveyed with equal clarity in five, the sentence is not concise. On the other hand, a sentence of fifty words is in no sense brief, but it is concise if the point can be made in no fewer words. Observing a few general rules of sentence construction will help you avoid certain kinds of wordiness.
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