Sentence Fragments

Hi all, it's me again.  I hope you are bearing up under all this rain.  Seems that we here at OLPC-West are tumbling around in Mother Nature's personal washing machine.  I just returned from a mission in Sydney, Australia.  Then, a short trip to New York where I witnessed a dear friend's wedding.  What fun.  Though, I must warn you, when traveling down under bring lots of cash.  Almost twice as expensive despite the currencies approaching parity.

There.  Right there.  Did you notice my error?  I ended the last paragraph with a sentence fragment.  It's a common enough mistake.  We get to thinking fast.  Our fingers don't catch up with our thoughts, firing like twin 50-caliber machine guns.  Fragments confuse your audience.  Their reading comes to a dead stop along with their interest.  They have to go back to try figuring out what this poor soul is trying to say.  But you're in luck.  We can solve this devilish dilemma right now.

Every well-constructed sentence has both a subject and a verb.  Fragments lack one or the other, or [in desperate cases] both.  They cannot stand alone.  Here's a fragment:  Writing his homily all night.  Its lack of a subject raises more questions than it answers.  The solution here would be:  Father Flannigan stayed up all night writing his homily.  See?  Now we know just who failed to budget his time properly, thus requiring him to go without essential sleep. 

The easiest way to correct this error is to simply connect the fragment with the main clause.  Here's a complete sentence followed by a fragment:

OLPC-West owns a number of small businesses.  Such as a vineyard with a micro-winery attached.  Notice how the fragment just hangs out there, dangling in the breeze? 

Here's my correction: 

OLPC-West owns a number of small businesses, such as a vineyard with a micro-winery attached. 

See how that works?  Now we have a complete sentence.  And, as you may have guessed, Father Flannigan is our cellar master.  He's working on a deal with Trader Joe's to sell his Zinfandel under the label, Cardinal Zin.  Flannigan's reach has always exceeded his grasp--Cardinal, indeed.

            That's all for now.  I'm on my way to the sacristy to check our supply of wafers.  Uses them for his wine tastings.  [Oops].