What Are Run-ons and Sentence Fragments?

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Kari Wethington for Expert Village.com. Today we are doing Writer's Guide: Self Editing Basics. Let's take a look at three different types of sentences that have some sort of structural issue and we'll look at ways to fix those things. We are going to look at a run-on sentence a sentence fragment and also just an awkward construction. Sometimes you just can't pinpoint the problem, but you know there is a problem. First let's look at a run-on sentence. Even just looking at this sentence, you can see that it is really long and wordy. But let's read it. Sally grew up in London with five siblings and worked from the time she was 15 years old in order to support her family and her ailing grandmother, who was diagnosed with lung cancer when Sally was still a teenager and dealing with the death of her parents a few years before. There's a lot going on here. There are so many ideas that this could easily be broken into shorter sentences with main points. There are so many main points here that it gets lost in the jumble. So we'd want to go back and rework this completely. The second example is a sentence fragment. It says: Left really early last night. This is something you might find in an email and maybe it would be okay there, but we don't know who left early. We don't know really what's going on so it's not a complete sentence it's not a complete thought. So we would want to add in some more information to make it more clear to your reader. The third example is just an awkward sentence structure. It's a lot of real short sentences so the rhythm gets a little bit jumbled. Ohio has many wineries. It's been a booming business for the region. In the next five years it's expected to grow. This could probably all become one sentence or become two more well-rounded sentences.

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