Fixing Fragments and Run-Ons

Read this out loud, on its own: “Running through the forest.” Does it feel like a finished thought, or like it's waiting for something else? Most people's ear catches that something's missing, even without knowing what. Now read this one: “The forest was dark she kept running anyway.” That one has the opposite problem — it doesn't feel like it's missing anything, it feels like it's got too much crammed in with nowhere to breathe.

These are the two most common sentence problems in a first draft, and they're exact opposites. A fragment is a piece of a sentence pretending to be a whole one — usually missing a subject or a real verb doing the action, the way “Running through the forest” never says who is running. A run-on is two or more complete sentences crammed together with no punctuation or joining word between them, so two separate ideas get read as if they were one.

Catching both by ear

Why read it out loud instead of just checking it on the page? Because your ear notices incompleteness faster than your eye does. If a piece of text doesn't sound like a whole thought by itself, it's probably a fragment. If you find yourself wanting to take a breath in the middle, with no punctuation there to let you, it's probably a run-on.

Fragments aren't always mistakes, either — writers use them on purpose sometimes, for effect: “She ran. Faster. Faster still.” The difference between a fragment doing a job and one that's just an accident comes down to a single question: did you mean it?