Complete Sentences

Complete Sentences. "Koko, can you proofread this letter to my Nana?" "Sure, let me look. This is a very nice letter, but I see you are missing some complete sentences!" A sentence is a word or group of words that have a complete thought and makes sense on its own. Sentences always begin with a capital letter and end with punctuation. A complete sentence must have a subject and a verb. The subject of a sentence is the person, place, or thing that is performing the action of the sentence. In the sentence, 'Pip wrote a letter to send to his Nana', the subject is Pip. The verb of a sentence tells us what the subject is doing. The verb of this sentence is 'wrote' because it tells us what Pip did. If a sentence is missing information, like the subject or a verb, we call it a sentence fragment. We correct sentence fragments by adding the missing information. If a sentence has too much information, or the independent clauses are not joined properly, we call it a run-on sentence. We can correct it by adding punctuation to separate it into two independent thoughts or clauses or join these together with a conjunction. Let's read through Pip's letter and correct the sentence fragments and run-ons. Dear Nana, it's me, Pip! I hope you are doing well! That I miss you. 'That I miss you ' is not a complete thought, so we need to correct it by adding the missing information. We add the subject to the sentence since Pip is writing the letter, the subject would be ‘I’ and we put it here. The verb phrase is what Pip was doing. He wanted to tell his Nana that he missed her, so we'll add the words 'I wanted to tell you' here. The complete sentence says, I wanted to tell you that I miss you! Koko and I are living in a treehouse. Koko is my best friend we go everywhere together have so much fun. This is a run-on sentence because there is more than one complete thought that is not connected properly. The first complete thought is 'Koko is my best friend', so we will put punctuation here. Since a new sentence starts here, we now need to capitalize the ‘W’ in we. We go everywhere together and have so much fun are also two complete thoughts. These two thoughts can remain inside the same sentence because they are joined by the conjunction ‘and’. A talented artist and very smart. What does Pip need to do to make this sentence fragment a complete sentence? He needs to add a subject and verb. Koko is a talented artist and very smart. She is so funny I want to be just like her! How would you correct this run-on sentence? One way to correct this run on sentence is to add punctuation and make it into two separate sentences. She is so funny! I want to be just like her! In the comment section, share one of the other ways you could correct this run on sentence. Write back, Nana, love, Pip. While Pip sends off his letter, let's review. A sentence is a word or group of words having a complete thought. Sentences begin with a capital letter and end with punctuation. A complete sentence must have a subject and a verb. If a sentence is missing information, like the subject or verb, we call it a sentence fragment. We correct sentence fragments by adding the missing information. If a sentence has too much information, we call it a run-on sentence and correct it by adding punctuation or a conjunction. "Koko, my Nana wrote back to me and sent me a present!" "What is it, Pip? Go and try it on!" "Look! I look just like you!"