Especially for My Students . . .

If you're one of my students seeking guidance re: your basic writing skills, welcome! There's no shame in not being clear about certain issues pertaining to grammar, punctuation, etc.

In my quest to keep every post relatively short, let's tackle the problem of the run-on sentence.

A run-on is where two different thoughts are improperly connected -- or, in effect, not connected at all -- and thus form a run-on of words that makes for a disaster of a "sentence." Here's an example:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get.

It should be clear that the run-on occurs between the words "anticipated" and "she." These are two separate thoughts that run together, forming -- you guessed it -- a run-on sentence.

It would ALSO be a run-on if the wrong punctuation mark -- a comma -- appeared like so:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated, she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get.

While that may look ok, it's not. It's a comma splice, which is another term for run-on.

The comma would be ok, however, if the sentence read like this:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated, as she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get.

So there are THREE SOLUTIONS to fix a run-on sentence:

1 Use a semi-colon where the run-on occurs.
2 Use a conjunction, such as "as, but, because, while," etc.
3 Break the thought into two separate sentences.

Here's how our example sentence would look with a semi-colon:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated; she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get.

Here's when a semi-colon works: when it's used to join two independent clauses. And ONLY when the two clauses it's joining are independent.

It's simple. An independent clause means the phrase can stand alone (independently) and read as a proper sentence. In the example just given, "Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated" can stand alone. It reads ok. It reads like a sentence should. It's independent.

And the second clause (the one that comes after the semi-colon) also is independent: "she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get." So a semi-colon is the proper punctuation mark to un-do the run-on problem here.

Let me show you how, if the second clause were NOT independent (i.e., if it were a "dependent" clause, needing some other words in order for it to make sense as a stand-alone phrase), then a semi-colon would NOT be the proper way to un-do the run-on sentence problem:

"as she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get." Do you see? That is not a sentence. Not a separate, stand-alone, independent thought (or independent clause). It simply makes no sense -- taken alone -- to say, "as she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get."

So, you use a semi-colon to solve a run-on problem ONLY when it joins or connects two independent clauses.

The second approach is using a conjunction, generally accompanied by a comma (but NOT a semi-colon). Thus:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated, because she realized how bad the weather was threatening to get. The conjunction here is the word "because."

And finally, simply make two sentences out of it all:

Susie went to the store earlier than anticipated. She realized how bad the weather was threatening to get.

Well, that took a bit longer than I'd hoped. But I hope you understand what we've covered here. Good luck!