I'm not being mean; I mean it

One of my colleagues at the University of Northern Colorado brought this error to my attention. We've both found it popping up on student papers recently. Here's the problem:

Jane Smith is a journalism professor. Meaning she teaches journalism at a university.

That's not two sentences. It's a sentence and a sentence fragment. "Meaning that..." is not a full sentence because it cannot stand on its own. This means that it should be connected to the first sentence. Did you see how I avoided the error in that last sentence?

The proper sentence would look like this:

Jane Smith is a journalism professor, which means she teaches journalism at a university.

Notice that I didn't say "... meaning that she teaches journalism ...." I just don't like the sound of that. Also, notice that I used four dots instead of three at the end of the sentence that began this paragraph. Three dots (an ellipses) indicates a pause. Four dots (or an ellipses with a period) indicates a pause followed by the end of a sentence. Paying attention to little things like this makes your writing that much better. And that means a lot.