The Complete Sentence
Jenny Morse, PhD
Author and CEO
You already know what it is, right? Then you do not need to read this blog post. Ok, smarty, challenge: Show what you know below.
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A complete sentence in English has to have two things: a subject and a verb. The subject = who or what the sentence is about. The verb = what the subject is doing (which might be just being).
I am.
That’s a complete sentence. You can use a sentence like that one as a kind of invocation, if you are the first person to arrive on Mars or the first animal to attain consciousness. Since most of us are not just discovering that we exist, our sentences are typically more sophisticated. Like
I am short.
That sentence describes my height.
I am Jenny.
That sentence tells you my name.
Jenny goes for a run.
Now we’re getting sophisticated. Most of our sentences are longer, more complicated packets of information than these. But pretty much all of our sentences will have a subject and verb because those two elements form the basis for how English builds an idea into language.
For example, if I said to you
“Jenny goes to the.”
You would look at me waiting for me to finish the idea because you know, without really thinking about it, that a sentence in English doesn’t end there. “The” is only used before another word (a noun, like “store”). So, a sentence in English can’t end on the word “the.”
Remember, our brains are more sophisticated than all that auto-generated predictive text that we now see in our gmail or word docs. There are rules about what words can start sentences, what words can end them, and what order that information has to go in to make sense to another person. You know those rules because you have learned to speak and write in English. “Grammar” is the name we’ve given to those rules so that we can talk about them, study them, and hold people accountable for them.
Why is it worth your time to remember what a complete sentence is in English? Because while our spoken language is made up of fragments and run-ons (fragments–phrases rather than complete sentences; run-ons–multiple sentences joined together incorrectly), our written language has to be more correct. Because people are reading it. And most of the time, you are not there reading it out loud over their shoulder so they can hear what you sound like when you say the words or see your face as you say them.
Your writing exists in the mind of the reader without the presence of your body to help shape the meaning of the words. This is both why writing is amazingly cool (Carl Sagan likened it to time travel) and incredibly hard (the words are all by themselves without a body to create tone–which brings us to the invention of emojis. Brilliant.).
As a result of its lack of a body (no voice, no face, no gestures), writing has to be more correct than spoken language. It has to rely more on the rules–our shared knowledge of grammar–so that when you write something down, I can figure out what it means.
A sentence is a little story: one complete unit of information that basically tells us who did what. If it is missing information–starts in the middle, leaves something out, ends abruptly–the reader doesn’t get the whole story.
Starts in the middle: Specifically, the way he does answers the phone.
Leaves something out: Feel free to the manager.
Ends abruptly: Once the report is submitted, we’ll.
Fragments like these happen when we don’t proofread carefully, when we get interrupted, or when our attention is elsewhere. Probably, you would find these errors when you were reading, if you were reading carefully.
On the other hand, run-ons happen when multiple ideas get strung together incorrectly. Remember, the sentence is a unit. When you put too many units together, people stop paying attention, they can’t follow the connections, the sentence just drags on and on without stopping. Like that. Those errors are called comma splices, and they happen when a comma is used to connect two (or more) ideas that could each stand alone.
People stop paying attention.
They can’t follow the connections.
The sentence just drags on and on without stopping.
Each idea is its own unit. And those units cannot be joined together with a comma alone because commas don’t work like that. But that’s a whole other blog post.
For now, all you need to remember is that a sentence in English is a complete thought, and that to be complete it must have a subject and a verb. Without both of those things, it’s a fragment. Too many of those things, and it’s a run-on.
