Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Ramble-On Sentences

Tonight I will be doing one of my rare talking-about-proper-grammar blog posts.  It seems that a lot of people don't quite know what a run-on sentence actually is.  A run-on sentence is an actual grammatical error where you have two independent clauses in a single sentence.  In simple terms, it means you have two sentences crammed into one (or you have two sentences worth of words, but one sentence worth of punctuation).

Most people seem to think that a run-on sentence is simply a sentence that is very long.  Sadly, that's not right.  You can string as many dependent clauses onto a sentence as you like and it will still be grammatically correct.

More often than not, writing suffers from what I call ramble-on sentences.  It's what happens when a sentence is extremely cumbersome to read and impossible to say easily, but it's not a run-on sentence.  It's not incorrect writing, but it is bad writing.

Of course,that doesn't mean you can't use an extended sentence effectively; it just means you have to really know what you're doing, and that you still can't do it very often.

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