Firstly, Microsoft Word is correct in its designation of Because I don’t know what you don’t know as a fragment. Because is a subordinating conjunction that fronts a dependent clause. A dependent clause written alone without its associated independent clause is a prime example of a sentence fragment.
Secondly, it is worth regarding Word's grammar feedback as simply alerting the writer to certain aspects of the text that may be problematic. It does that also with all passives, for example. This feedback should not be regarded as prescriptive; there will be numerous occasions when the feedback can absolutely be ignored. Your context is one such occasion. The fragment Because I don’t know what you don’t know follows the question. There is no ambiguity and there is absolutely no need to avoid the fragment by re-including the question as the independent clause.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
What's wrong with this sentence (other than that it is incomprehensible out of context):
MS Word is telling me that this is a sentence fragment (I disagree). MS Word said the same thing about an earlier version of it:
I'm trying to write a FAQ for my syllabus (don't worry, I'm teaching math, not English). One of the Q&As goes like this:
I think this is a perfectly reasonable sentence. It means: I don't know what piece of information you don't have in your naive, little student brain, which makes you incapable of understanding my perfectly clear explanation of integrating using the shell method to calculate the volume of a solid generated by revolving a region outlined by a few functions around another line (I mean, really?).
The subject is "I". What am I doing? I'm not "knowing", the verb. And then the rest of the plain English sentence.
Or maybe is MS Word even stupider than a calculus 2 student?