Analyzing Sentence Fragmentation in Undergraduate Final Project Abstracts

Abstract

This study examines sentence fragments in English-language abstracts of undergraduate final projects written by students of the English Education Study Program at Universitas PGRI Semarang. The  study reworks an earlier final-project analysis into a journal-style report while retaining its original documentary dataset. Twenty abstracts from the 2018/2019 academic year were examined through qualitative document analysis. Fragments were identified, classified, quantified, and interpreted according to their structural characteristics. Ten fragment instances were identified in six of the twenty abstracts. Four categories occurred: missing-subject fragments, missing-verb fragments, incomplete-verb fragments, and dependent-word fragments.

Missing-subject fragments were the most frequent, accounting for 40% of the identified fragments, followed by missing-verb fragments (30%), incomplete-verb fragments (20%), and dependent-word fragments (10%). The findings indicate that although fragments were relatively infrequent across the complete corpus, they were concentrated in a small group of abstracts and primarily involved omitted or incomplete core sentence elements. The analysis also suggests that careful revision, especially checking subjects, finite verbs, verb complements, and dependent clauses, is important in producing clear academic abstracts. The study contributes a focused description of sentence-fragment patterns in undergraduate thesis abstracts and provides practical targets for academic-writing instruction.

Keywords: academic writing; English as a foreign language; error analysis; sentence fragments; thesis abstracts. The abstract includes the introduction, objective of the papers, method, results and discussion, and conclusion including novelty of the research.