Grammar Girl- Run-Ons

For episode 49, Grammar Girl speaks on the topic of run-on sentences. Unlike last weeks article on commas, I like to think that I do a fairly good job of not writing with run-on sentences. If anything, I tend to overuse punctuation in my writing. It was interesting none-the-less to learn a little bit about these improper sentences. For example, I did not realize that run-on sentences were actually sentences missing punctuation. Instead I though (as Grammar Girl predicted) that run-on sentences were simply sentences that were too long. I also agreed with Grammar Girl’s statement that, “it’s important not to over-think your sentence structure.” When I was in high school, teachers put so much emphasis on proper sentence structure, that it would often take me days to write a 3-page paper. Now that I am in college and papers of these lengths are due sometimes daily, I sort of self taught myself to ignore all the rules. I do this while I am getting ideas down on paper, and then I go back and try to fix the problems. I find this method allows me to write multiple-page papers in hours rather than days.