About Grammar: Complete Sentences

He refers to me as “The Ex-English Teacher,” especially when he’s angry at me because I am making him do his homework.  Actually, it’s not that I’m making Mr. SP do his homework necessarily, it’s more that I’m making him check over his homework.  He actually does his homework quite quickly.  The problem lies in the  fact that he rushes through it as quickly and sloppily as humanly possible so he can get it over with and start reading a book, and then I come along and stick a post-it note on the top of his paper reminding him to “Write the answers in complete sentences.”  Sometimes I also write “Check for punctuation and capitalization” because they are often absent.  It all leads to a battle.

It’s the complete sentences that throw him over the edge.  Even he (such a reader, not a willing writer) realizes that capitalization and punctuation is important and expected, although he doesn’t like doing it.  It’s the notion that an answer would need to have extra, unnecessary words that makes him incomprehensibly upset.

In my “Ex-English Teacher” life status, I am really quite relaxed about the grammar, mechanics and spelling that others use.  If you read this blog often, you’ve probably figured out that I make a lot of mistakes myself, especially if I don’t proofread what I’ve written.  It’s not that I don’t know better, or couldn’t fix those mistakes.  Mistakes happen, and sometimes a person literally doesn’t have time to carefully check something over multiple times.  I often notice the mechanical and grammatical errors of others when I’m reading, and I just pass by without making a big deal out of it inside my little head.

Incomplete sentences, though, really do drive me crazy.  It’s tricky because sometimes using an incomplete sentence is stylistically appropriate, and important for the voice of the writing.  Sometimes incomplete sentences are written on purpose, for a very specific reason.  I’ve even done this!  Usually, in those scenarios there is a thoughtful choice about why to make a sentence incomplete.  So often, though, people just lazily leave off the subject of their sentence and write a series of incomplete predicates right in a row, even if the subject of the sentence is a simple little pronoun like “I” that would fix the whole affair!  One little letter that is capable of making all the difference between  someone looking intelligent and seeming like a poor writer.  Really, along with a bit of irritation at those kinds of sentences comes a sadness for the writer.

There are also the incomplete sentences that are really dependent clauses, not attached to independent clauses.  There is such potential for a great, complex sentence structure, but the  writer messes up and places a period where a comma should be, and it’s all over.  I’m less frustrated with these kind of sentences, because sometimes people just forget that dependent clauses are dependent on their independent sibling.  Or perhaps they’ve just forgotten that dependent clauses even exist and have them mixed up with complete sentences, since a dependent clause does, after all, have a subject and predicate of its own.

All this is to say that complete sentences are really important, and they’ll never stop being important to me.  If there was one thing I could change for writers all over the world, it would be an ambition to use complete sentences in all places except where they’ve made a specific stylistic choice not to.  I want everyone to know how to write a complete sentence, and want to do it.  A thought is always better if it can be expressed as a complete thought, an answer is always better if it is completely and clearly expressed.

Therefore, “Never waste an opportunity to use a complete sentence” is my (unpopular) mantra around here.

Stay tuned:  coming soon are posts about parenthetical expressions  and explanation points, two things I sinfully and  heavily overuse while writing.  I bet you can’t wait!