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EXAMPLES

  • He finally bought the book, or so I thought.

  • :The two independent clauses are joined by a comma and the coordinating conjunction "or".


  • Either he goes or I go.

  • :The compound sentence is held together by the correlative conjunction "either…or".


  • Mary understands math; she has studied it for years.

  • :Here the two are joined by a semicolon with no conjunction.



CONTRAST



RUN-ON SENTENCES

It is common for manuals of style, grade school English teachers, and other such proponents of Prescriptive Grammar to caution against the use of ''run-on sentences'', defined as a compound sentence with "too many" independent clauses. While the exact specification of "too many" is obviously subjective, a commonly given number is three.

Examples:
Bob gave me a book and I read it and I didn't like it and I gave it back to him.

Grandma came to visit and we went to the zoo and we saw the ferrets and my friend Emily has a ferret.


It can be argued, however, that at least when teaching children, this advice against run-on sentences is not entirely a prescription on their grammar but rather a way of teaching that clauses in a sentence should be semantically related, not just a stream of consciousness. Therefore, although both examples above have the same number of independent clauses, it is probably the second that should be singled out as a run-on.

Note that the term run-on sentence is not usually used for complex sentences with large number of clauses. For example,
Bob gave me a book, which I read and I didn't like, so I gave it back to him.

is not a run-on sentence.


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