[mturk]

My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end just before submitting it and finalizing it.

But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.

[mauvehaus]

It's always the late additions that get you. Our wedding favor to our guests was a cookbook of recipes we collected with the RSVPs[0]. About the last thing I added was an About the Recipes page which included the following paragraph:

We have edited recipes for length and for typographic consistency, but we've done a bad job of it. This is in part because we did much of the editing with a drink in one hand; if we hadn't it never would have gotten done. We hope that we've successfully retained the color and character you put into the recipe while making the finished cookbook look at least somewhat consistent rhoughout.

[0] I cannot begin to describe how much work this was. If you're reading this and thinking "how lovely", you've been warned.

[gerdesj]

Would you mind sharing that fragment?

I'm a 53 year old en_GB speaker and writer and long term owner of a copy of "Usage and abusage: A Guide to Good English" and long ago decided to boot the bloody thing into the long grass.

You and I (and every other interaction involving English) decide how English is spoken or written. At least Partridge uses the term "guide" for his treatise. There is no such thing as a pure English, finely polished and honed to a razor edge and delivered with equanimity. I think the best we can all hope for is to be mutually understood.

Given all that, I don't think I've ever heard of a "sentence fragment". It sounds like a grammar sin, probably funded by the lower circles of hell. I attended several very posh schools in the UK as well as the standard education system hereabouts and I don't recall that term being used. Perhaps I was asleep at the time.

I've done a quick search and this is dreadfully fluffy: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistake-of-the-month-sentence...

I'd love to hear what "sentence fragment" really means: to whom and why.

[leplen]

English sentences need a subject and a verb. Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this).

[mturk]

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:

"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."

What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!

[NeoTar]

Possibly you may have come across it under the term an 'incomplete sentence' - as others have stated, it's a set of words which don't form a complete thought.

I'm also a en_gb speaker, and I'd never heard of the term until my teen years using the Microsoft Word grammar checker.

[Loughla]

That is delicious.

I'm absolutely certain that she loved it. I would've. That's too funny not to.

[JadeNB]

Fragments. Damn good device.

https://www.consc.net/misc/moser.html

[euroderf]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?