Sentence Construction

What Exactly Is a Sentence?

Sentence construction. You use it everyday. But, what exactly is a sentence?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.

In order to express a complete thought, every sentence must have two parts:

1. The subject (someone or something)

2. The predicate (what the someone or something is being or doing.)

That's it! A sentence is just someone or something being or doing something.

Some groups of words may have only one of these two parts.

When this happens, you are dealing with a sentence fragment. A sentence fragment is a group of words that does not express a complete thought.

When you read a sentence fragment, you are left wondering whom or what the sentence is about or what happened in the sentence.

You can change a sentence fragment into a complete sentence by adding the missing information.

Sentence Fragment	Sentence
in the butter	My glasses fell in the butter!
early this morning	I awoke early this morning.
running across the field	I saw you running across the field