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ldhensonI'm actually not complaining about the use of run-on sentences. Goes without saying.
Rather, it's something I've seen appear more and more often in recent years: the misuse of the definition of a run-on sentence.
A run-on sentence really doesn't refer to a long, wordy sentence that contains numerous commas/semi-colons and incorporates many different ideas. As long as the commas/semi-colons are employed correctly, there is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. You may need to worry about losing your reader in the long flow of words and ideas, but if so, that's more a stylistic issue than a grammatical one, and any problems stemming from that still don't qualify your sentence as a run-on.
What a run-on is is any sentence that incorrectly joins two independent clauses, usually with commas.
It has nothing to do with the length of the sentence itself.
For example:
The sun is shining, there are birds in the trees.
Not a very long sentence, but definitely a run-on. As a counterexample, "The sun is shining, there are birds in the trees, and the lake's edge is bright with dragonflies, stiff-winged and lazy; I used to spend my childhood summers here, but that was decades ago, and my current summers, too short by half, are now frittered away at overpriced seaside resorts" is not.
Think of it as the inverse of the sentence fragment. A fragment is an incomplete sentence. A run-on is too many complete sentences jammed into one without appropriate linking.
ETA 1/30/2005: Whoa, I tracked the raft of new responses back to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
daily_snitch. As I'm not in HP fandom, I hadn't heard of it before. That's cool.
Rather, it's something I've seen appear more and more often in recent years: the misuse of the definition of a run-on sentence.
A run-on sentence really doesn't refer to a long, wordy sentence that contains numerous commas/semi-colons and incorporates many different ideas. As long as the commas/semi-colons are employed correctly, there is nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence. You may need to worry about losing your reader in the long flow of words and ideas, but if so, that's more a stylistic issue than a grammatical one, and any problems stemming from that still don't qualify your sentence as a run-on.
What a run-on is is any sentence that incorrectly joins two independent clauses, usually with commas.
It has nothing to do with the length of the sentence itself.
For example:
Not a very long sentence, but definitely a run-on. As a counterexample, "The sun is shining, there are birds in the trees, and the lake's edge is bright with dragonflies, stiff-winged and lazy; I used to spend my childhood summers here, but that was decades ago, and my current summers, too short by half, are now frittered away at overpriced seaside resorts" is not.
Think of it as the inverse of the sentence fragment. A fragment is an incomplete sentence. A run-on is too many complete sentences jammed into one without appropriate linking.
ETA 1/30/2005: Whoa, I tracked the raft of new responses back to
daily_snitch. As I'm not in HP fandom, I hadn't heard of it before. That's cool.
