I must say that I'm very excited to see how much interest people are taking in this World, and I love that we're getting so many requests for topics (even though that means they need to be stretched out over the course of the month). Anyway, onto this week - and I promise, I won't punch the babies today.
Running On and Splicing Commas:
I've driven one poor girl here to the brink of insanity with this week's subject, declining her fanfiction for publication over and over citing "comma splices" to the point where she now has a mild phobia of commas. Here's hoping that this week I can at least kill some of those fears.
Run-on sentences and comma splices are pretty much the same thing; they both involve a sentence error involving two or more independent clauses (ie. "full sentences") connected without correct punctuation or conjunctions. The only difference is that a comma splice has a comma between the two clauses while a run-on sentence has nothing at all.
Filling In About Full Sentences:
First, I want to give a quick recap about clauses and full sentences.
As I mentioned last week during the semicolon talk, a clause - a group of words that make up a full sentence if you put a period at the end of them - has two parts: a subject (the main noun of the sentence) and a predicate (everything that describes the subject including the verb). As long as you have these two parts, then you have a full sentence.
If that seems a bit too abstract, I'll put it in another way: all complete sentences need a verb to compliment the subject noun. Further, if the verb requires an object noun, then you need that too.
Consider the following:
Isaac Newton died a long time ago.
Kon, excited, dove for Orihime's chest.
Earlier today, I drove to the Purolator office.
When you're missing any of those parts - the subject, the verb, or the object if it's needed - then you have an incomplete sentence (or a sentence fragment).
Hey cool, I worked sentence fragments into this talk too. Umm... if anyone needs more info on these do say so for later, okay?
Back to the Topic At Hand:
So now we have a fuller understanding of what complete sentences/clauses are. When you have your subject noun and your verb, you're in a happy place; if you're missing one, you have a sentence fragment.
So what happens when you have too many of them?
When you jam two complete clauses next to each other, that's how you get a run-on sentence:
Isaac Newton died a long time ago he was not alive during the 20th century.
Kon saw Rukia's panties she was not amused.
I shot the sheriff I did not shoot the deputy.
All of the above examples are run-on sentences; they are sentences with two clauses not separated by conjunctions or proper punctuation.
"Isaac Newton died..." and "he was not alive..." are two different clauses.
"Kon saw Rukia's panties" and "she was not amused" are two different clauses.
Now let's say those examples were comma splices instead:
Isaac Newton died a long time ago, he was not alive during the 20th century.
Kon saw Rukia's panties, she was not amused.
I shot the sheriff, I did not shoot the deputy.
See? Just about the exact same thing as a run-on sentence, but with a comma instead. Either way, they're both errors involving too many independent clauses, and you don't want those.
I hope that this is also illustrating that run-on sentences aren't always "long sentences". When you hear "run-on", you sometimes imagine a long, rambling thing which isn't always the case; all that matters is if it has too many clauses or not. Just keep that in mind for when you read through your works and stuff.
How To Catch/Fix Them:
The easiest way to tell if something is a run-on sentence or a comma splice is to stick a period in there. If you have complete sentences on both sides of the thing, then yes, that's what you have going for you:
Kon saw Rukia's panties. She was not amused.
I shot the sheriff. I did not shoot the deputy.
Actually, a period is probably the easiest fix for these sorts of problems (grammatically, anyway). But say you don't want the heavy stop of a period because of how you want your writing to flow? You can use a semicolon instead, maybe even a dash or use parentheses (again, depending on how you need your writing to flow).
Kon saw Rukia's panties - she was not amused.
I shot the sheriff (I did not shoot the deputy).
The other less punctuation-intensive means to fix a run-on sentence or a comma splice is to use a conjunction between the clauses. This is literally as simple as putting the word "and" into a sentence and is likely to be a good fix for a lot of these instances:
Kon saw Rukia's panties and she was not amused.
I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy.
(So you see, Eric Clapton knew his grammar!)
The Dreaded Exceptions:
This wouldn't be modern English if there weren't exceptions to the rules! So now we understand comma splices and how they're ugly. Still, there are times where comma splices are more or less accepted in writing, especially if they're shorter and maybe have that "list" feel to them:
Words were exchanged, feelings were hurt.
So that kind of comma splice is sort of accepted now, especially for stylistic touches to writing. Like Beck said last week about stylistic uses of sentence fragments in things like first-person narration: "know the rules first, then break them."
The other main exception to the comma splice thing would be in a more formal "list" type thing:
Megabyte and Hexadecimal joined forces, Bob was shot into the web, and Enzo was left to defend Mainframe on his own.
In cases like these, the commas between the clauses are more like replacements for the word "and".
To be fair, I am having some issues trying to explain this one in a better, more professional way but right now the "rules" for this escape me. I can promise that that above example is correct, but if someone else with a better handle on linguistics and whatnot can come and explain this a bit better, I would be totally grateful.
To Recap:
So once again, to summarize the main points of this monster piece that probably ran longer than I originally meant for it to run:
- A clause by itself makes up a full, complete sentence.
- A complete sentence has a subject, a verb, and often an object.
- A sentence missing a subject, verb, or object (if the verb requires it) is a sentence fragment.
- A run-on sentence is a sentence with more than one clause without proper punctuation or conjunctions connecting them together.
- A comma splice is the same basic error as a run-on sentence, but with a comma separating the two clauses.
So that's run-ons, comma splices, and to a lesser degree sentence fragments.
(Any questions? Comments? Concerns? Tell us here and we will do what we can to help!)
