Craig,

Anyone who uses that second "definition" will be calling one heck of a  
lot of fragments sentences.  In my research of all the essays  
published in "Best American Essays" of 2001 and 2003, I found that  
about ten percent of all units that began with a capital letter and  
ended with a period were fragments.  And I did NOT count and dialog,  
any imperatives, or any "verb understood" constructions  (e.g., "He  
would if he could.")  Had I counted these, the number of fragments  
would have been considerably higher.  As I recall, of the 50 or so  
authors represented, only four did not use fragments.

Ed S

On Sep 21, 2009, at 1:02 PM, Craig Hancock wrote:

>   I'm working on a project that starts with a critique of current  
> (school based) descriptions and definitions of the sentence, but it  
> occurs to me that I may be unaware of practices in other parts of  
> the country.
>  The most prevalent definition I run into from students starting  
> college in New York state is "a sentence is a group of words that  
> expresses a complete thought". This is echoed in "Writing Talk", 5th  
> edition, 2009, Winkler and McCuen-Metherell, (just sent me by a  
> publisher, so I'm using it as a representative text for college  
> level) who follow that up with "This completeness is what your  
> speaker's ear uses to recognize a sentence" (p. 49), which fairly  
> nicely frames the approach--not a full description of the sentence,  
> but an attempt to awaken the student writers' intuitive feel for  
> minimally necessary forms.
>  The other definition/description I get is that "a sentence is a  
> group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a  
> period, question mark, or exclamation point", which would seem to  
> grant the writer discretion in deciding what constitutes a sentence  
> (complete thought or not.)
>   The point I'm trying to make (at least at the start) is that these  
> approaches have limited utility and may be deeply misleading for  
> anyone hoping to push toward a deeper understanding.
>  But am I missing something? Are any of you aware of school based  
> approaches that take a different tack?
>
> Craig
>
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