As Catherine Prendergast reminds us, Nonfiction Writing is not a course in the arcane rules of English grammar and usage--you might have noticed that we haven't yet diagrammed a single sentence, although I have given some general reminders and overviews of a few common issues of punctuation and usage. Much of your sense of a sentence's "correctness" will be instinctual for you, as a native speaker and reader of English: you can hear a subject-verb disagreement when you read a sentence aloud. A sentence fragment sounds and feels incomplete.
We want to make sure that our final drafts are as correct and clear as possible, in terms of grammar and punctuation, because we don't want to inhibit the reader's ability to understand what we're saying, and we don't want to look dumb. As part of the editing and revision process, you should attend to grammar, and if you're not sure what the rule is, look it up. We don't order a specific "manual" for Nonfiction Writing, although there are plenty of books out there that could serve as useful resources (and they all contain basically the same information). There are also now a number of easy online resources you can consult, when need be, to clear up confusion about rules and usage: search Grammar Girl, consult the University of North Carolina's handy Tips and Tools, or browse Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL).
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