An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Nine -- I wrote a sentence it was a run-on sentence

We did adjectives! Everyone, take a moment. Yeah.

OK, this one is nice and easy, and you should be able to read this one while, I don't know, mowing the lawn? Fighting the troll king? Smooching the handsome prince or princess? All three at once?

Anyway, this time we're going to treat ourselves to run-on sentences. Show rather than tell: here's a run-on. This is a common-or-garden 'fused' run-on.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb the penguins played their crazy melody.

The fused run-on is nice and easy, because it's so obviously wrong. We can see that it's two clauses badly welded together. And that's all a run-on is: it's a sentence which has been improperly assembled from smaller component sentences. A fused one is where they just got slammed into each other, and left, smoking.

Before we go in too deep, it's worth taking a moment to remind ourselves of something: you don't worry about this on pass one. Pass one is about getting down your work down. You edit much later. So if your first draft doesn't have one well-formed sentence, then, well done, because you have a finished first draft that you can then fix (plus if you really have managed to make every one of your sentences broken, you may have just written the next great piece of modernist literature). Fixing run-ons is a very late-stage thing.

Great, we've done the insurance advert caveat. So how do we fix?

It's pretty obvious. We either split into the sub-sentences, or we fix the join. Splitting is easy. Stick a full stop in, boom.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb. The penguins played their crazy melody.

Fixing the join is harder, and is something I get wrong a lot. Your two options are a semicolon, or a conjunction and a comma. Compare and contrast.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb; the penguins played their crazy melody.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb, while the penguins played their crazy melody.

Now this is when the knives get picked up. Should you semicolon or not? In my experience, this has the highest chance of any topic of inducing stabbing-in-the-throat-with-a-fork level arguments between writers. Why? Because it's deeply personal, we all have different opinions, and everyone's basically correct.

Let's quickly run down the pros and cons.

Semicolons are definitely more terse. You're supposed to use a conjunction with a comma, and that adds one extra word. If you try and get the best of both worlds, by dropping the conjunction and using a comma on its own, you end up with a different kind of run-on sentence: it's a 'comma spliced' run-on sentence, because we have two sentences improperly spliced together by a comma.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb, the penguins played their crazy melody.

Now, everyone will be enraged when they read that sentence. However, half are enraged that it's allowed; the other half are enraged that it's forbidden. Me, I just want to get through the week without finding venomous animals in my underwear drawer, so point your murderous fury somewhere else, yeah? But the fact is, by the rules of grammar, that's technically not fine. And yet, it looks kind of OK.