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IMPROPER BOUNDARIES BETWEEN SENTENCES
“I love the SAT, I don’t understand why people hate it.”
What’s wrong with this compound sentence? A few things, actually.
1) It’s not a compound sentence. 95 2) It’s a run-on, specifically a comma splice. 3) Somebody loves the SAT. Run-on : A sentence that combines two or more independent clauses without proper punctuation between them.
A run-on is not defined as a long sentence. Some sentences can be hundreds of words long. One of the most famous long sentences in literature comes from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . The sentence is over 800 words long.
There are two types of run-ons:
Fused Sentence
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I love the SAT I don’t understand why people hate it.
Notice the sentence I love the SAT and the sentence I don’t understand why people hate it are fused together with no punctuation: a boundary is needed.
Comma Splice
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I love the SAT , I don’t understand why people hate it.
splice to join together by connecting ends
Notice the sentence I love the SAT and the sentence I don’t understand why people hate it are spliced together with only a comma: an improper boundary.
“What’s wrong with using a comma between two sentences? You have to pause between them. For example: I love the SAT—pause—It’s my favorite test.”
A comma is indeed a pause, but it’s not a long pause. Grammatically speaking, a comma is defined as a 2-second pause.
For example: “Yesterday [1-second, 2-seconds] , I didn’t get any sleep.”
But in the earlier example, a longer pause is needed: at least a 4-second pause. It therefore needs a period, which, grammatically speaking, is defined as a 4-second pause.
For example: “I love the SAT [1-second, 2-seconds, 3-seconds, 4-seconds] . It’s my favorite test.”
“Wait. So, I should actually count the number of seconds that I pause for commas and periods?”
95 Well, it could be if it were properly punctuated.
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