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How to Give Your Readers Breathing Room

Run-on sentences make reading your writing more difficult than it has to be. Not only does your main point get in danger of being lost amidst a mass of words, it becomes terribly taxing to read without pause too. I bet you, even the most lenient English software will point it out during a grammar check.

Granted, some people can pull of sentences that never seem to end. Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, for instance, once wrote a story that contained 1,800 words in a single sentence. He is a high-level professional, though, who likely pores over his craft with the careful attention it deserves - the kind that most of us can't really spare for a university essay or an office report.

If you want to ensure clarity, avoiding run-on sentences is one of the simplest things you can do. In case you find yourself with one such expanded construction in your draft, you can use one of these approaches to fix it:

  1. Take the sentence apart, down to its constituent ideas. That means, isolating each unit of thought into its own phrase, then finding an alternate way to present them.
  2. Divide the sentence into two or more separate sentences. Break apart the sentence into their own logical sentences. Just make sure to vary your sentence lengths to facilitate more interesting reading.
  3. Use semicolons, commas, parentheses and transitional phrases. You can retain the long sentence if you'd like, but use punctuation and transitional constructions to add pauses and make it easier to digest.

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