Surprise Run-Ons

With the new unit being taught in class, we've had two guest speakers visit class to talk about their trade and discuss how they got there, and what their jobs mean to them. The first was the Professors father - a school psychologist somewhere in Colorado - and the second was a young female lawyer from a local firm. The lawyer was the most recent of our visitors as she stopped in on Wednesday; however, she was a minute or two late and the Professor wanted to wait for her outside the building. With the Professor gone, I was left in charge of the class with a brief assignment given to me from the Professor as she was walking out the door: teach run-on sentences.

Most individuals have an idea of what a run-on sentence consists of. It is two complete clauses joined together with no punctuation, or in some cases they can be joined with a comma. I know this. I'm an English major and I was a huge comma splicer back in my early days of writing. If you didn't follow that link and read what it had to say, you should. A comma splice is basically the joining of two independent clauses with a comma. There are times that it may be acceptable use, but for the purposes of an English 101 class, we're going to say that the comma splice is illegal.


This should not have been a difficult task for me to complete, but suddenly it became problematic for me. I had no time to prepare, and started trying to think on my feet while at the same time keeping the attention of the class. If you've ever had to think on your feet in front of a room full of people four years your minor, you might know that it can be a bit daunting. I wanted to come up with an example of a run-on sentence that was simple, yet I could not think of anything but the simplest of run-ons. "The dog was hungry it ate the cat." As I neared the end of my sentence, the students I knew from substitute teaching high school classes began giggling. I turned around, and started asking them questions about my sentence. "What's wrong with this sentence? What can we do to make it correct?" Some of them raised their hands; others blurted out answers. They were all correct telling me that it was a run-on of sorts, and it needed some punctuation, like an "and." At this point I broke into the hook of "Conjunction Junction" to which many of the students looked at me rather awkwardly. Never mind the awkwardness, they understood - I think - what I was getting at.

Overall, I think it went alright. The students knew what I was talking about, and when they attempted to find run-ons in their peers' papers, for the most part they were able to do it. I feel that I was able to explain run-ons, but I wanted to go further into grammar and explain more about clauses being independent, or dependent and how to make them such. While explaining these things takes little time, I feel they are seldom taught in the English classroom and students are simply expected to know them. If every English teacher took five minutes every other class to explain some grammar concept, I think knowledge of grammar would improve momentously.

Ways to Fix a Run-On:
1. Add a conjunction preceded by a comma.
Ex.) The dog was hungry, and it ate the cat.
2. Add a semi-colon. Although the semi-colon can be tricky and is not recommended by some in early writing, it is a suitable way to fix a run-on. A semi-colon can be used when the two clauses are closely related.
Ex.) The dog was hungry; it ate the cat.
3. Add a period and create two separate clauses.
Ex.) The dog was hungry. It ate the cat.