A few weeks ago, you may remember that Donald Sobol, the author of the Encyclopedia Brown books died. But I found about about it in an unusual way. The Washington Post used the headline, "Donald Sobol, author of beloved 'Encyclopedia Brown' children's mystery series, dies at 87" Unfortunately, the news summary app on my phone just takes the first however-many characters it can fit and uses that as the headline, with no indication if it's the entire headline or not. So all we saw was, "Donald Sobol, author of beloved 'Encyclopedia Brown' children's mystery series". Um, that's nice, what about him? Of course, I suspected what the story was going to be about just from the headline fragment that I saw. But when you're getting bad news, it's frustrating that they can't even deliver it properly.
But sometimes sentence fragments are actually intentional. Many crawls or web sites just take all the headlines in a newspaper or newswire, under the mistaken assumption that all headlines are a self-contained factoid. For instance, you'll be watching the headlines crawl across the bottom of the screen on your favourite news channel, and in between, "European Leaders Meet to Avoid Financial Crisis" and "Kofi Annan Tries to Save Peace Agreement" there'll be something like, "Seven Tips to Cut Your Gluten Intake." God forbid you should think the next seven items are the tips.
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