My thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions vis-a-vis dictionaries. I think it gives me rather a lot of dictionaries to sort through!
Here's something truly horrible: it would be a comma splice, except that instead of a comma, the author has used a semi-colon.
*shudder*
I
literally don't understand what he was going for there; semi-colons can be used to relate two independent clauses that have related meaning, or to delineate complex lists, but they
can't be used as a substitute for fullstops
and commas! It'd be as bizarre as using no grammar other than fullstops!
That said -- as I've said before in this thread -- I'm fine with non-traditional (or even patently incorrect) grammar, so long as the use of grammar has painted a better scene than the correct grammar would have painted; however, in this case I'm not sure it has.
I don't even understand that sentence. ^
Teresa commented that I used 'run ons' a lot in one of my short stories and I had to go look it up to see what it was. I kinda think I know. Kinda don't.
As for comma splice...
A 'run-on sentence' is a sentence which involves two or more independent clauses that aren't joined by appropriate conjunctions or punctuation. I'll try my best to break those concepts down in an easy to understand fashion.
Independent Clause
An independent clause is basically a sentence that makes sense on its own. In its simplest form, an independent clause will contain at least one noun (a 'thing') followed by at least one verb (an 'action'). In lah-dee-dah posh grammar speak this is referred to as a 'subject' (the thing the sentence is about, and the thing that's 'doing' the verb) and a 'predicate' (the bit of the sentence that modifies the thing the sentence is about). A quick test of whether something's a dependent/subordinate or independent clause is to remove that part of your longer, potentially run-on, sentence and see if it makes sense on its own. For instance:
"The fire engine was red and was used to douse the blaze."
What parts of the above example might be a clause? Well, it can't be the 'and' because 'and' is a conjunction (a word used specifically to join two clauses or words). This means it's got to be the stuff around the 'and', so these are our two clauses:
"The fire engine was red"
"was used to douse the blaze."
So which of these two sentences is the independent clause? Are they both independent clauses? To find out, we apply our noun+verb (subject-predicate) rule:
"The fire engine was red": Has both a subject noun (fire engine) and a verb (was).
"was used to douse the blaze.": Has two verbs (was used, to douse) and one object noun (the blaze)
We can now see that the first sentence makes sense on its own. It's not very informative, but it does make sense; the subject of the sentence (the doer in the sentence which should be introduced prior to the verb, or it results in passive voice (ignore that, I'll explain that too if you want)) is being modified by the verb. Conversely, our second sentence
doesn't have a subject at all; it has an object (the blaze) which is being affected (doused) by an unknown subject (? was used). We can see now that our second sentence doesn't make sense
at all without reference to the first sentence, so our second sentence
isn't an independent clause: it is a subordinate clause (a clause which helps to provide more information about the independent clause, but can't stand on its own).
Joining Independent Clauses
So how, and why, might we joined two independent clauses? We might want to join two independent clauses when we want to relate two separate, but interdependent, concepts to one another. For instance, consider the following sentence:
"It was a balmy summer's night, the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky."
This is a comma splice (a run-on sentence), so called because we've taken two independent clauses and just shoved them together with no appropriate conjunction. If we examine the sentence above, we can see there are two independent clauses with one on each side of the comma:
"It was a balmy summer's night" pronoun (It) + verb (was)
"the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky." noun (the clouds) + verb (crawled)
A comma can't be used to join two independent clauses, that's simply not its function. Commas can be used in a vast number of ways, but cramming together independent clauses isn't one of them. Many ways in which a comma can be used are described
here (but it's by no means a full list).
So what can we do? We want to link the ideas in both independent clauses, but we don't want to seem like a lazy writer! We have a couple of ways of turning our run-on sentence into a bona fide sentence:
1) Use a semicolon
Semicolons are the brooding, misunderstood punctuation. They're used for a number of reasons, but chief amongst them are uses that link two thematically linked independent clauses and uses that link the items in a complex list (a list whose members contain commas). Solution:
"It was a balmy summer's night; the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky."
Here's where we've got to be careful not to overuse semicolons: semicolons can't directly follow one another as punctuation. For instance, if we were to add a third independent clause:
"It was a balmy summer's night, the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky, the fairground ride's lilting lullaby filled the crowd with excitement."
Then it wouldn't be acceptable to just add a third sequential semicolon:
"It was a balmy summer's night; the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky; the fairground ride's lilting lullaby filled the crowd with excitement."
Instead we'd have to find another piece of punctuation or a conjunction!
Really, the criteria of use for a semicolon should be a slightly more direct relationship between the two independent clauses, but I couldn't think of a particularly good example.
2) Use a conjunction preceded by a comma
A conjunction is a FANBOYS word:
For
And
Nor
But
Or
Yet
So
It is used to link two things together, and that includes independent clauses! When we link two independent clauses together with a conjunction, it is proper to precede the conjunction with a comma as so:
"It was a balmy summer's night, and the clouds dreamily crawled across the sky."
As with the semicolon, we shouldn't keep this string of conjoined independent clauses going with a comma and conjunction: eventually we're going to need some different punctuation like...
3) Make them separate sentences
It's also perfectly acceptable to just use a standard fullstop to turn them into two separate sentences. After all, they're both independent clauses and can stand on their own merits:
"It was a balmy summer's night. The clouds dreamily crawled across the sky."
Hope this helps you a bit. If you need some further explanation (or if someone wants to correct me!) then just yell.
