词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Lida Baker: Common Sentence Errors

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 8, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away. But with me from Los Angeles this week on Wordmaster is English teacher Lida Baker¹.

LB: "What we're going to talk about today is four types of common sentence errors, the kinds of mistakes that I see in my students' writing all the time. And I'm going to give some examples, and it might be easier for the listeners to follow along with me if they could write down the examples that I give. So the first type of error is called a sentence fragment. Now what is a fragment?"

AA: "A little piece of something."

LB: "A little piece of something. So a sentence fragment is a little piece of a sentence. It's not a complete sentence. So let me give you the most common example of a sentence fragment that I see in people's writing all the time. It goes something like this: 'I never eat chocolate. Because I'm allergic² to it.' Do you see the problem?"

AA: "Yes. That really should be one sentence."

LB: "That really should be one sentence, right. Now the first part -- 'I never eat chocolate (period)' -- that's fine, because that is a sentence. It has the subject 'I', and then it has the verb part 'never eat,' OK? So that's a complete sentence.

"The problem is the second part, 'because I'm allergic to it.' That can't stand alone as a sentence. What you have to do is you have to connect it to the complete sentence that came before it. When it stands by itself, it's called a dependent clause, or a subordinate clause. And the way that you fix a problem like this is that you take that dependent clause and you attach it to an independent clause, which is the same thing as a full sentence."

AA: "Wouldn't some people say there should be a comma in there, between those two clauses?"

LB: "No, no, no. Because if you put a comma in there, what you're doing is creating a different kind of sentence error, which is called a comma splice³. In a comma splice, you have two sentences, two complete sentences that are separated by a comma. But what they should have in between is a period. So an example would be something like this: 'I never eat chocolate, I'm allergic to it.' Do you see how each of those parts is a complete sentence? So according to the rules of punctuation⁴, we cannot use a comma to separate those two parts of the sentence."

AA: "So now we've gotten through the fragment and the comma splice. So what's next?"

LB: "Next we have what's called a run-on sentence. A run-on sentence consists of two independent clauses. And, remember, an independent clause is the same thing as a sentence. So it's two independent clauses that are not separated by any punctuation. So you have something like: 'I never eat chocolate I'm allergic to it.' In that case you can even hear that it's wrong. Because to say 'I never eat chocolate I'm allergic to it' doesn't even sound right. If we say it this way, though, 'I never eat chocolate (pause) I'm allergic to it,' you can actually hear where the period is supposed to go, right?"

AA: "Right."

LB: "It goes in the middle, between the two sentences."

AA: "OK, we've got fragment, comma splice, run-on sentence, and the fourth kind of sentence error is ... ?"

LB: "The stringy sentence. Let me give you an example of a stringy sentence: 'I never eat chocolate because I'm allergic to it, and I don't like nuts either, so I never eat them, but I'm not allergic to them, so last week I went out and I bought some nuts.' Now what do you think is wrong with that?"

AA: "Is that all one sentence?"

LB: "Yes, that is a stringy sentence. What we have there is a whole string of sentences, of independent clauses. All of them are separated by a comma and a conjunction: and, so, but. And as long as you punctuate⁵ it correctly with a comma and a conjunction, it isn't wrong. But you can hear that it just doesn't sound right. It sounds like somebody who's just babbling⁶. And it's not considered good writing.

"Good writing is writing where you have a lot of variety in your sentences. Some of them are short. Some of them are long. Some of them are simple. Some of them are compound. Some of them are complex. So it's not static. It isn't symmetrical, OK? There is a lot of variety and a lot of different rhythms. This is what we consider to be good writing."

AA: Lida Baker writes textbooks for English learners, and she teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Internet users can find all of her previous segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. And the e-mail address for Wordmaster is。。。。。。Avi Arditti.

 

1 baker   

n.面包师

参考例句：

• The baker bakes his bread in the bakery.面包师在面包房内烤面包。
• The baker frosted the cake with a mixture of sugar and whites of eggs.面包师在蛋糕上撒了一层白糖和蛋清的混合料。

2 allergic   

adj.过敏的，变态的

参考例句：

• Alice is allergic to the fur of cats.艾丽斯对猫的皮毛过敏。
• Many people are allergic to airborne pollutants such as pollen.许多人对空气传播的污染物过敏，比如花粉。

3 splice   

v.接合，衔接；n.胶接处，粘接处

参考例句：

• He taught me to edit and splice film.他教我剪辑和粘接胶片。
• The film will be spliced with footage of Cypress Hill to be filmed in America.这部电影要和将在美国拍摄的柏树山乐队的音乐片段粘接在一起。

4 punctuation   

n.标点符号，标点法

参考例句：

• My son's punctuation is terrible.我儿子的标点符号很糟糕。
• A piece of writing without any punctuation is difficult to understand.一篇没有任何标点符号的文章是很难懂的。

5 punctuate   

vt.加标点于；不时打断

参考例句：

• The pupils have not yet learned to punctuate correctly.小学生尚未学会正确使用标点符号。
• Be sure to punctuate your sentences with the correct marks in the right places.一定要在你文章句子中的正确地方标上正确的标点符号。

6 babbling   

n.胡说，婴儿发出的咿哑声adj.胡说的v.喋喋不休( babble的现在分词 )；作潺潺声（如流水）；含糊不清地说话；泄漏秘密

参考例句：

• I could hear the sound of a babbling brook. 我听得见小溪潺潺的流水声。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Infamy was babbling around her in the public market-place. 在公共市场上，她周围泛滥着对她丑行的种种议论。 来自英汉文学 - 红字