Ed,

I know what you mean about teachers hunting down fragments. A colleague 
critiqued essays by students in my expository writing class once. She was 
very critical of one essay by my best writer because of the following 
sentence.
"That is if your house isn't blown away by the hurricane."

She totally missed many good qualities of the essay and instead focused on 
this sentence as an example of the low level of the student's writing 
ability. This student wrote such good essays from the very beginning of my 
class that I used her papers in later classes as examples. I think the above 
example was the only fragment she ever used, and it's easy to see why she 
thought it was a complete sentence. It's also an example of an acceptable 
fragment in context.

It was very weird.

--

Christine Reintjes Martin
[log in to unmask]




----Original Message Follows----
From: Edward Vavra <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar              

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