June 25, 2013

Mistake of the Month: Run-on sentences

According to Grammarlys research, run-on sentences are among the top grammar mistakes made by writers worldwide. A run-on sentence contains two or more independent clauses (a group of words with a subject and a verb that can stand alone as a sentence) that are not connected with correct punctuation. Though there are different kinds of runon sentence errors, most often writers neglect to use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, etc.). Correct usage: I enjoy writing immensely, and my deadline is looming. Incorrect usage: I enjoy writing immensely and my deadline is looming.

Here are two situations that require a comma before a coordinating conjunction: when listing three or more items in a series when and is being used to coordinate two independent clauses (a group of words with a subject and a verb that can stand alone as a sentence) Although run-on sentences may be technically inaccurate, they are common. And, like any writing rules, they can be employed as a stylistic choice. Famous Culprits Using Run-on Sentences Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both won The Nobel Prize in Literature, and they are both known for their long, run-on sentencesas is James Joyce. Contemporary writers like Cormac McCarthy and Tim OBrien also have literary love affairs with the run-on sentence, but if they didnt, would their writing be as beautiful as it is? They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried If you think run-on sentences are completely manageable, try making sense of The Most Excruciating Run-on Sentence in the History of the Internet. And, if youd like to see another example of an intentional and artistic application of a run-on sentence, check out One Sentence Love Story by Nick Cox. Do you think the use of run-on sentences adds to, or detracts from, the quality of literary writing?
http://www.grammarly.com/about/blog/mistake-of-the-month-run-on-sentences

Maureen O'Connor Thought catalog 12/28/11 3:16pm 32,838 117

The Most Excruciating Run-On Sentence in the History of the Internet

Fascinating experiment in professionalized egoblogging Thought Catalog has finally figured out the secret of life. "Wonder What The Secret Of Life Is," Brandon Scott Gorrell muses in the title of a post that begins with a quote from Atlas Shrugged. (Then apologizes for beginning with a quote from Atlas Shrugged.)

The ensuing article is enthralling, from a cultural anthropological point of view. Here's the best/worst sentence: Because I mean one of the truths about being a modern Western individual is that you likely have this idea about a person you want to be, and that person has a title even, a title like Young Professional or All-Around Good Person Of Above Average Intelligence, and to justify excessive gaps' in productivity by holding firm the belief that you're "only human" and thus naturally lack sufficient motivation to do anything beyond obsessively watching YouTube videos and browsing reddit where the premise of the idea of doing "anything beyond" obsessively watching YouTube videos and browsing reddit has, in a kind of relief, suddenly become sort of congratulatory, as if by doing "anything beyond" watching YouTube videos and browsing reddit you've become secretly heroic or are, just by not wasting oxygen, currently actualizing a person you want to be/ have always known you were/ are at your coreto justify your inaction with the belief that you're "only human" is a behavior that stands in opposition of who you tell yourself you want to be and believe you are, if you have any Western-style aspirations at all. There are people who read that sentence, and found meaning in it! A whole tribe of English-speaking Americans who construct thoughts in a way that neither you nor I can fathom. (The internet tells me this Gorrell person is "the Bret Easton Ellis for the Gmail chat generation," which is actually another series of words that, when strung together in that order, are rendered completely meaningless to me.) It's sort of dazzling. In other news, I continue to be greatly relieved that Thought Catalog didn't exist whenever in my life I had thoughts like this, and believed them worth cataloguing. Feel free to quote this post back to me in a couple years, when I grow to be deeply ashamed of everything I wrote this year. It's the way of our digitally-recorded future. [Thought Catalog, running man via Ostill/Shutterstock] Update: Via Twitter, Gorrell notes that I declared his run-on the most excruciating ever on the same day that Thought Catalog ran a "One Sentence Love Story" that is 1700 words long. Also, upon further googling I discovered that Gorrell and I are the same age, so the last paragraph of my post is probably moot. Our difference is not one of age, but some invisible culture barrier. A Culture War of Bloggers.
http://gawker.com/5871661/the-most-excruciating-run+on-sentence-in-the-history-of-the-internet

One Sentence Love Story

Dec. 22, 2011

By Nick Cox Sometimes when you think you love something what you really love is not the thing itself but just some small and inessential part of it: you think you love banana splits but really you just love the maraschino cherry on top and you think you love autumn but really you just love getting a Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks and you think you love Shrek but really you just love that montage near the end after Shrek and Fiona have their falling out when hes sitting in his swamp all alone and shes getting ready for her wedding and Rufus Wainwrights cover of Hallelujah is playing in the background, and you think youre in love with him but really youre just in love with the smile that pops onto his face when he spots you in the Think Coffee near Washington Square Park, in love with the way it makes you feel to see someone look at you like that, look at you like youre the only real thing in the entire world, even though he only looks at you like that because he just moved to the city a month ago and doesnt know anyone and because he saw you on the subway reading the same book that he was reading, which made him think of a New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine that he once saw when he was in high school, except on the New Yorker cover the boy and the girl were on different trains, and when he saw you reading the same book that he was reading he thought Heres my chance to make it right as if the boy and the girl on the New Yorker cover were real people, since in high school he liked thinking of himself as the sort of person who thinks of fictional characters (especially tortured young men like Hamlet and Raskolnikov and Stephen Dedalus) as real people and never quite got out of that habit, just like he never quite got out of the habit of fantasizing about his middle-school crush or the habit of starting up a multiplayer game in a first-person shooter just to wander around the level all alone or the habit of coming downstairs in his pajamas on Christmas and sitting crosslegged on the floor opening his presents and smiling involuntarily because Santa brou ght him just what he wanted or the habit of sometimes waking up in the middle of the night with a nameless fear lodged in his heart and crying out, in the quietest whisper, for his mother, and because since moving to the city hed started feeling that fear even in broad daylight when he saw an ambiguity on the subway map that might make him late for work or an abandoned shopping cart filled with dirty plastic bags or when he thought about how maybe this morning he left his apartment door unlocked or maybe today hell be talking with someone and theyll bring up a movie hes never seen or maybe someone is mad at him for doing something he doesnt even remember doing, but really feeling that fear all the time and just being reminded of it at certain moments, reminded that it had become his default state, not a fear of something so much as a fear of the lack of something that he felt in the center of his stomach as if there were no center there at all, as if he were built around nothing but an emptiness and had to exert a constant effort just to keep from collapsing inward like a black hole, and he would lie awake at night feeling the emptiness gurgle up and down inside him and sometimes feeling what he thought were the inside surfaces of his stomach rubbing against one another and saying ouch, ouch, ouch and twisting his face like he would cry when stomach acid refluxed into the lower part of his esophagus and sometimes being afraid that he had stomach cancer but then seeing you reading the same book that he was reading on the subway that he hadnt yet realized was the wrong subway, which he got on because of an ambiguity on the subway map, seeing you reading the same book that he was reading and thinking of that New Yorker cover and thinking Heres my chance to make it right except he didnt realize he was thinking either of those thoughts but thought he was just thinking Im going to go talk to that girl and then getting up from his seat and walking over to you and saying Hey is that a good book? and laughing and not feeling embarrassed at all even though he knew the other people on the train would see what he was doing, and seeing you nod and laugh and thinking about how the two of you already had an inside joke, and then seeing that hed gotten on the wrong train and would be late for work because the train had gone past his stop and the stop after and kept going and going and going, which was exactly what hed been afraid of when he saw that ambiguity on the subway map and now the thing hed been afraid of was happening, except now that it was happening he wasnt afraid at all because on the wrong train he found a girl who was reading the same book that he was reading and went up to her and talked to her and made her laugh and they

already had their little inside joke together and they were already talking about where they lived and where they were from and what they did and when the train stopped at 125th St. he said he had to get off and go back downtown but did she want to grab coffee sometime and she said yes that would be great and he said okay how about six oclock tomorrow at the Think Coffee near Washington Square Park and she said that sounds great and he said okay see you then and walked away feeling better than he had ever felt in his entire life because hed been in the city for a month and hadnt made a single friend and had spent every night just drinking alone and watching porn and masturbating over and over and over until it hurt to come as if there was something inside of him that he was trying to get rid of except that thing was not something but the lack of something but now all of a sudden there was another human being in his life and life was going to be okay after all, life was going to be better than okay, life was going to be everything he ever imagined it would be, except better because it was going to be not imaginary but real, after all these years of living out his life in fantasies it was finally going to be real, and he spent the next day and a half not thinking any thoughts excep t ITS GOING TO BE REAL ITS GOING TO BE REAL ITS GOING TO BE REAL over and over and over until six oclock the next day when he walks into Think Coffee and looks around and then sees you and thinks ITS REAL and the thought registers on his face as a smile, a smile that says, with absolute clarity, You are the only real thing in the entire world, and that smile not him, but that smile is what youre really in love with, and you think you love Jameson but really you just love that time when you were home for winter break your freshman year of college and your dad poured you a glass of it like it was no big deal, like it was something he did all the time, even though it was the first time your parents had ever given you alcohol, and you sat on the couch by the fire and drank it and it burned but youd already been in college for a semester and you were getting used to the burn of alcohol, even getting to like it, and you liked thinking of yourself as the sort of girl who likes whiskey, and you sat by the fire and listened to your dad read Twas The Night Before Christmas out loud and drank just enough, just enough to feel like every cell in your body was buzzing with happiness, and later when the fire had turned to embers you and your parents watched The Snowman on VHS and you were still feeling just drunk enough that during the Were Walking In The Air part, for the first time in maybe eight years, or at any rate for the first time since whenever it was that you turned into a surly teenager and started wearing dark lipstick and hating your parents, you lay your head on your moms shoulder and you didnt feel embarrassed at all when she put her arm around you and kissed your head and didnt even feel embarrassed when you cried a little bit into her hair at the end of the movie and she stroked your hair and rocked you back and forth just a little bit and maybe even said shhh really quietly and kissed your head again and you just let her do it because you didnt feel embarrassed at all because you were just drunk enough, just drunk enough to feel, for just one night, like a child, and you think you love Animal Collective but really you just love that one moment in In The Flowers when the beat rises up out of the swirl of noise and Avey Tare sings Then we could be dancing, no more missing you while Im gone and you feel like oh my god Ive been waiting for this my whole life, which is why you play Merriweather Post Pavilion right after sending the boy you met on the subway, the one who was reading the same book you were reading, the last text you will ever send him, and why you wonder why it isnt making you feel any better.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/one-sentence-love-story/