Perilous Adventures
spacer
line decor
line decor
spacer
 
 

Grammar Lesson: Run-on Sentences

by n a bourke

Grammar is a system of rules that apply to language, especially written language. And yet, as most writers understand, grammar is not there to be slavishly obeyed, so much as understood and danced with. Good writing is writing that has an assured and familiar relationship with ‘correct’ grammar, while knowing that sometimes the wrong thing (grammatically speaking) is exactly the right thing. In this section of the newsletter, you’ll find us weekly rabbiting on about some aspect of grammar, but to begin with I thought I would write a small paean to run-on sentences. A run-on sentence is a sentence that is too long. A sentence with multiple additions, like a freight train composed of multiple clauses, linked by conjunctions or semicolons. Some of my favourite writers – Virginia Woolf, Henry James – are great proponents of the run-on sentence. A run-on sentence is familiar to me from childhood, partly because it is so common in the Bible:

And God said, ‘Let their be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19)

Of course, this isn’t strictly speaking all one run-on sentence; there are a few new sentences, but they all begin with conjunctions, which link the whole paragraph as though it were a single sentence. Run-on sentences, as you can see in this example, are litanies; they have a rhapsodic, liturgical gait. Commonly, run-on sentences are criticised for being difficult to read, difficult to understand, which is probably true of many of them. Not all. Here’s a long sentence from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

There are many astonishing and enviable things about Virginia’s run-on sentence. One of the most astonishing is that despite its length – 181 words – it’s a perfectly graceful, witty and easily comprehensible sentence. It is lucid and intelligent and so well-moderated it is almost musical. Here’s a more contemporary example from Cormac McCarthy:

There were a few last warm days yet and in the afternoon sometimes he and his father would sit in the hotel room in the white wicker furniture with the window open and the thin crocheted curtains blowing into the room and they’d drink coffee and his father would pour a little whiskey in his own cup and sit sipping it and smoking and looking down the street. (from All The Pretty Horses)

With its looping, insistent, flowing style, the run-on sentence lends itself to breathless action sequences, landscapes, journeys and descriptions of the workings of the unconscious. It’s no good for policy or business writing, for exposition or making arguments. The examples above combine the two ways of forming run-on sentences: with conjunctions, or through parataxis. Paratactic run-on sentences are formed by the use of semicolons rather than conjunctions. Like this extract from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway:

But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she had loved Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful home, and there her sister lived still, making hats.

Though this sentence isn’t as long as the other example from Virginia, it clearly illustrates how differently a paratactic run-on sentence’s rhythms work compared to those of the compounds of the Biblical quote. Faulkner often uses a combination of the two to create the curiously South American drawling rhythms of his prose:

And now he knew that it was the waiting and that night he crept out; he had not heard them but he knew they were there and in the dark he could smell their fear too; he stood erect then, shouting at them in the darkness: ‘Yao. Come and take me. Why are you afraid?’ (from ‘The Bear’ in Big Woods)

A run-on sentence can be draining, uplifting, erotic, suspenseful, heartfelt – it can drown or overwhelm or carry a reader. It can convey a feeling of transport, of faith, of urgency and fear. It is, grammatically, a suspect and difficult animal. You can easily lose your reader, or confuse them. So it’s wise to use them judiciously and sparingly, at least, until you can wield them with the clarity and strength of purpose of writers like Virginia and William. Until you can write your run-on sentences so beautifully, so elegantly, that the reader rides along inside them with you, heart pounding, to that final resting place – the period.

Looking for trouble

Open up your latest masterpiece and have a look for some run-on sentences that have arisen ‘in the wild’. Cut and paste hem into a new document, or copy them out on a fresh sheet of paper. Now, let’s play. Peter Carey talked about a process of writing he called cantilevering: a process in which he would rewrite passages of his work, adding more material in between the words and sentences each time. Choose one of your run-on sentences that might benefit from a grammatically incorrect, liturgical rhythm and play. Rather than correct and shorten and neaten it, really let fly. Exercise your paratactic muscle, and your ampersand key, and connect rather than disconnect. Loop and sing and fly down the page for as long as you can without coming to a (full) stop.

***

issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author