Thank you to all who answered this thread. All the comments were very helpful. The teacher who pointed it out to me was quite clear on her judgement that this student had a big problem with fragments. There were no other fragments in the essay, and I was puzzledAby her reaction and then wondered how to explain the problem to the student. My class is seeing a lot of examples of fragments (as rhetorical devices) in professional wriiting in the text we use. So, this is a good lesson on different contexts. My student's fragment produced negativity from a teacher judging her on a practice "exit exam" for English 111, but the same fragment would be accepted elsewhere. -- Christine Reintjes Martin [log in to unmask] >From: Bruce Despain <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar ><[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Re: This seems like a fragment >Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 16:39:52 -0700 > >I'll vote for this fix! This is how we handled such fragments in high >school in >the 1950's. You will probably remember my complaint a few weeks ago about >the >fragments in the Harry Potter series. Perhaps the idea of punctuating them >as >sentences has been a long time coming. It doesn't mean we have to agree >with >it, though -- I hope. > >Bruce > _________________________________________________________________ Create a Job Alert on MSN Careers and enter for a chance to win $1000! http://msn.careerbuilder.com/promo/kaday.htm?siteid=CBMSN_1K&sc_extcmp=JS_JASweep_MSNHotm2 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/