Run-on sentences

Carol justcarol67 at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 1 02:08:10 UTC 2009


I'm curious as to how other posters define the term "run-on sentence" since I've seen several posters (Potioncat, for one, IIRC) describe their sentences as run-ons when, in fact, they're perfectly legitimate sentences. Here's a self-described "run-on" from a recent post by Goddlefrood to the main list:

"While it is true that many current celebrations, and this
actually includes other major religions, revolve around
earlier so-called pagan rites, the fact remains that the
roots of Christmas, Easter (a movable feast nearly upon us)
and many other landmarks in the Christian church are in much
earlier (considerably earlier than Roman, btw) times."

While this sentence is highly complex (probably technically compound/complex given that subordinate clause ["While . . . rites"] interrupted by an independent clause ["and this . . . religions"]) and the two parenthetical insertions, it's not a run-on. Neither is my first sentence, with its parentheses within a parenthesis.) A true run-on sentence (according to all my composition textbooks) merely combines two sentences that ought to be separated by a period or semicolon this last "sentence" is an example.

Carol, wondering why Goddlefrood and others would classify his sentence as a run-on when nothing is run together





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