Complete Sentences with Examples

Read the following sentences:

1. A doctor is talking to a person. 
2. The nurse is taking a patient on a wheel chair.  
3. Three people are waiting to meet the doctor.  

The sentences follow a particular pattern, which we will discuss later on in the session, based on which we make grammatically sound sentences that make sense to the reader. 

Let us learn complete sentences with an example. 

Read the sentences: 

• We cooked.  

• We cooked pasta.   

Sentence 1 

• We cooked.  

It simply gives us a glimpse of the action that is being done. It doesn’t tell us what the subject was cooking. This sentence, as it lacks an object, can be called a sentence fragment. 

In Sentence 2 

• We cooked pasta.   

It has a subject which is a pronoun, followed by an action verb, which itself is later on followed by an object upon which the verb cooked is done.  

Here, unlike the previous sentence, we have the sentence conveying a complete thought to the reader and we understand fully what is actually happening. Therefore, we can call sentence 2 a complete sentence. 

A complete sentence is a collection of words that expresses a complete idea. 

A complete sentence must contain at least three elements: a subject, a verb, and an object.  

Typically, the subject is a noun or a pronoun. And, if there is a subject, there must be a verb because all verbs require a subject.  

In a sentence, the object is the thing on which action is being done by the subject.  

If a sentence lacks a subject, or a verb, or an object, it is considered a sentence fragment. 

Examples of complete sentences: 

• I wrote a poem. 
• My mother is a teacher. 
• My father bought a new car. 
• Jerry is upset because he flunked the exam. 

Examples of sentence fragments: 

• I slept. 
• She wrote. 
• We sang.