Rules Project Entry 1

I was reading an article in our town's local newspaper, The Daily Reporter, when I found two run-on sentences in a row.

If you take a look at the middle column, there are two sentences that could sound a lot better and make the article flow more easily. The first sentence says, "They purchased their property a few years ago and have been working on rebuilding the house and they have a garden with vegetables and corn." The next sentence reads, "They also have ducks and chickens and a miniature dachshund named Rebecca and cats who all get along with Bob."



Commentary:

According to an University of Oregon website, http://tlc.uoregon.edu/publications/studyskills/GrammarHandouts/Run-ons.pdf, a run-on sentence contains two independent clauses. Or in other words, a group of words could stand alone to have two complete sentences, or one could use proper punctuation to make the sentence correct.

I would also change the who in the second sentence to that because according grammarbook.com, "who" refers to people and "that" refers to groups or things.

In the sentences in the article above, I would get rid of some "ands" and put in more commas. If I were to correct these two sentences, they would read as follows, "They purchased their property a few years ago and have been working on rebuilding the house, which has a garden with vegetables and corn. They also have ducks, chickens, a miniature dachshund named, Rebecca, and cats, that all get along with Bob.