quote:Originally posted by T:man: Dante I still have a copy of the first five pages, pretty good actually. His writing is really visual (of course it has to be its a movie).
Orincoco those are not fragments, whatever do you mean when you say such things?
What the hell do you mean? Your not even quoting me there. There's no way I would say anything positive about that script. It sucked.
I'm pretty sure he was just pointing out that he uses complete sentences. Of course, I wouldn't brag about the grammar in the innermost quote, but that's neither here nor there.
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T: those are sentence fragments, or fragment clauses. When you say: "pretty good actually," without adding the third person singular pronoun "it," you are using a fragment. There is nothing really appallingly wrong with fragmented sentences- they can be effective, but you should know that you are doing it.
As a general rule of thumb, sentences (or dependent/independent clauses) require a Subject, a Verb, and an Object. If you leave one of these elements out (along with a few others I won't go into), then you are most likely implying the presence of the omitted part of speech. So in "pretty good actually," you have omitted the subject and verb, which is the script, or "it is." You've included only the adjective and adverb; everyone knows what you're talking about, but the sentence is still a fragment.
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quote:Dante I still have a copy of the first five pages, pretty good actually.
Inserting "it is" after the comma would be just as bad, unless he changes the comma into a semicolon. It'd be better to use "which are"; not scintillating prose, exactly, but at least grammatically correct. (Look, ma, a fragment! ) The worst offense IMHO is the lack of punctuation after "Dante".
*sits back and awaits the inevitable consequences of Davidson's law*
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posted
yes, I had it in mind to change it to semicolon and use a contraction, "it's." I just wrote it out that way to show how it might be made into a complete clause. As a dependent clause, "which is," followed by a comma is more appropriate.
If you are using "the first five pages," as a phrasal chunk, it would actually be singular, not plural. There is no hard and fast rule- it just depends on whether you want to refer to the pages separately or as a whole.
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) The worst offense IMHO is the lack of punctuation after "Dante".
