RUNAWAY SENTENCES

Hiya Kids!

Today I celebrate my 19th blog post on Perfectly Write Kids. If you’ve been assiduously following my blogs and applying the tips, I’ll bet you anything your writing has improved.

I live in Macau with my family, and though not as badly affected by the virus wreaking havoc in China, Macau is only next door. One of the precautionary measures has been to keep children at home and to tackle distance learning as their teachers post lessons online. I always wanted to home school my kids. And now I get to. Who says dreams don’t come true? Only they do it in the darnedest way imaginable.

The government ordering kids not to go to school?! Unprecedented! Unfathomable! Inconceivable! (for this last one, just think of The Princess Bride).

So yes, I’m at home, my kids are at home, my hubby is at home. While we were still on holiday but knew to be careful enough not to venture outdoors too often, we played Clue and Cribbage. Ah yes, I’m proud to say I taught my older kids how to play a rousing game of Cribbage, thus keeping that centuries-old game from dying out. What does the younger generation do with their time anyways?

If you’re at home too, you might have oodles of time on your hands. So let’s get cracking, Folks, and do something useful with our day!

Today I want to tackle the topic of run-on sentences, you know, the ones that sort of go on and on and the writer feels the need to put in every thought they’ve ever had or will have into that sentence, put in a few commas for good measure, but basically go on and on and not think of putting a full stop, as they say in Britain, or period in North America, and still think that all those words belong in one sentence and should not be broken up. Phew. That was a run-on sentence, FYI. But it was also a joke and mostly grammatically correct.

Here’s a simpler run-on sentence that you might be more likely to pen in your more unthinking moments:

He went to the store, it was closed so he went home.

Right.

You know S-V-O, right? You probably know it backwards and forwards and were taught it from the time you could crawl. You know it innately, but what you need to do is know it consciously.

He went to the store.

It may not be the most exciting sentence in the world, but it is a sentence in its own right. It’s got a subject (he), a verb (went), and an object (store).

You know when you’re playing a game of blackjack (just for points – no money involved) and you say “hit me” or “stay”? When you’ve got a complete sentence, that’s when you want to tell yourself “stay”.

Now that’s not to say that every sentence must be super short. Look at mine. I love long sentences, but I make sure they’re proper sentences.

You know all the tricks too. You know how to make sentences longer, how to join them with a but, because, and, so, etc.

Let’s look back at our model sentence:

He went to the store, it was closed so he went home.

It doesn’t have anything to join the two parts together except for a comma. And you can’t do that. Against the rules.

It was closed so he went home.

Can you spot the S-V-O? It’s a bit trickier here as there are two parts to it, but they are joined by the “so” making it ok.

Let’s break it down: subject (it), verb (was closed), subject (he) verb (went) object (home). The “so” sews the two parts together (to make a rather lame joke), making it ok.

We can re-write the whole thing like so: He went to the store. It was closed so he went home.

There, that didn’t hurt. Easy peasy.

Again, not the most exciting sentences in the world, but I’m just illustrating a point.

Want to have some practice spotting and correcting run-on sentences? Comments on social media are one of the best (or worst) places for bad writing. Read a few, see what the errors are, and correct it (in your own head). I don’t think anyone posting comments is interested in knowing where their errors lie!

If you spot a doozy of a run-on sentence, post it in the comments.

Know someone who would like to write better sentences? Send this post on to them. You’ll be glad you did, and they will likely thank you for it. What a polite world!

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