Run on sentences - Writers Forum

Oleander · 02-10-2004, 08:05 PM

Help! I love writing and I feel like I'm pretty good at it. I just can't seem to get rid of all my run on sentences...they're out of control. My problem is that I just can't see them while I'm doing my own work. My English teacher told me to read my sentences backwards and I'm going to try that, but does anyone else have any ideas for me on how I could try to fix this.

Nij · 02-11-2004, 08:11 AM

Hi Oleander,

I'm not quite sure what you mean - do your sentences go on and on for too long? Could you give us an example?

nij

speculative · 02-11-2004, 10:24 AM

Do you mean that you have three sentences strung together as one... or 20? I had a friend in college who thought it was a good idea to write a page and a half of material using only one period.

Grammar can get complicated; perhaps you could post a piece of your work that contains said run-ons?

-speculative

satisverborum2003 · 02-11-2004, 01:15 PM

I would advise you to write simple sentences in a notebook. I had the same problem but I find the method work, or you could simply read newspaper articles and analyse the sentences.

Darkwing · 02-11-2004, 03:52 PM

What helps for me is if I read the piece aloud. That lets me pick out most errors that occur.

Whende · 09-03-2005, 01:39 AM

Just go through and write. When your done, go back and find things that have two many comma's or ands seperate them with periods. If you really want something to be in one sentence but the sentence is too long, use a semi-colin.

Anarkos · 09-03-2005, 07:58 PM

Read Strunk: http://www.bartleby.com/141/

Lord Raiden · 09-05-2005, 04:45 PM

lol. I'm guilty of run on sentances a lot myself. I try to avoid them when writing, but sometimes I can't and when I go back through on my first edit I'll watch for them and try to see if it's one thought, two, or several and break it up accordingly. If I'm trying to say too much and it only works as one sentance then I did it wrong and I just scrap the sentance and rewrite it into several to make it work.

But as Whende said, just write it the first time to get your rough draft done, THEN clean it up on your first several editing passes. You need to get the thought down first. Worry about quality later. Now don't just go and write total crap the first time and expect to clean it up into a masterpiece the second time, but at the same time don't spend all day trying to do one paragraph to make it sound right. Because if you do, you'll never finish your book.

Stewart · 09-05-2005, 05:31 PM

You can certainly break each point stated within the sentence into separate sentences or, if you would like to explore huge sentences in prose then consider reading Jose Saramago's prose, or take a look at Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, a short story comprising a ten page long sentence.