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00:00Okay, you attack the wizard with your sword of infinite sharpitude, but he casts his spell
00:08of cloakiness and disappears.
00:15And as you're looking around in confusion, he reappears and smites you with his mace
00:20of smashery.
00:22Aw, come on, don't leave!
00:25This is fun, isn't it?
00:28Oh, fine, we'll answer a letter instead.
00:32Dear Tim and Moby, what is a sentence fragment?
00:35From Gemma.
00:36Hey Gemma, sentence fragment is just a fancy term for an incomplete sentence.
00:43Every complete sentence has a subject and a predicate.
00:47Moby fought the dragon.
00:49The subject is who or what the sentence is about, and the predicate tells you what the
00:54subject is doing.
00:57The most common type of fragment is a sentence without one of those key elements.
01:02For example, Rita the Sorceress is a fragment.
01:05Right, Moby, it's all subject and no predicate.
01:10There's no verb to tell us what Rita the Sorceress is doing.
01:13However, Rita the Sorceress cast her spell is a complete sentence.
01:18We fix the fragment by adding the predicate, cast her spell.
01:23Hey, not so fast!
01:25There's another kind of fragment that's a little trickier.
01:30Come on, stick around, I promise there'll be more cool fantasy art.
01:34Some sentences express more than one thought.
01:37Check out this sentence.
01:39When Rita the Sorceress cast her spell, Moby turned into a newt.
01:44The part of the sentence before the comma is a dependent clause.
01:49Well, a clause is a piece of a sentence that includes a subject and a verb.
01:54Sometimes, a clause can stand alone as a complete sentence.
01:58That's an independent clause.
02:00In the sentence above, Moby turned into a newt is an independent clause.
02:04It can form a sentence by itself.
02:07But a dependent clause doesn't form a complete thought.
02:10See, in this fragment, we don't know what happened when Rita cast her spell.
02:14You can even hear the difference.
02:16It just sounds like there should be something after it.
02:19The meaning depends on the rest of the sentence.
02:22To form a complete sentence, a dependent clause has to be linked with an independent clause,
02:27like Moby turned into a newt.
02:30So when you see a dependent clause by itself, that's another type of sentence fragment.
02:35Well, there's a trick.
02:38A dependent clause often starts with a word that connects it to the rest of the sentence.
02:42In this case, that word is when.
02:45Moby turned into a newt.
02:47When?
02:48When Rita the sorceress cast her spell.
02:51Other examples of subordinating conjunctions include after, because, before, if, since, though, and while.
03:01Nope, dependent clauses can go after independent clauses, too.
03:06In fact, mixing up the order of clauses will make your writing or speech more interesting.
03:12Like, Cassie was happy because she got a new sword for her birthday.
03:17And after Moby became a newt, Cassie fought the orcs alone.
03:22Get it?
03:24Now roll again. You're up against an entire army of bugbears.
03:35Uh, I guess that means you win.