How to Fix Run-ons and Fragments

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kari Wethington for Expert Village.com. Today we are doing Writer's Guide: Self Editing Basics. In the last segment we showed you examples of sentences that had some clear structural problems. Now we are going to show you ways that you can fix these sentences and make them work in your overall piece. The first example was a really long run on sentence. We have: Sally grew up in London with five siblings and worked from the time she was 15 years old. We took out some of the extra information and just made it one main solid point. The second sentence: Sally and her siblings lived with her ailing grandmother, who had lung cancer. We added that comma because we are describing the grandmother so we want to set that off. The third sentence is: Sally was also dealing with the loss of her parents, who died a few years before. The same thing with the comma there. We are describing the parents so we want to set that off a little bit. The second example was a sentence fragment. We added the name of the person who left the party early. So we have Susan left the party really early last night. We also added the party so it was clear who left and it also just gives the reader a little more information. The third example was just and awful jumble of sentences. We made it into one sentence that makes a little more sense. So know we have: Ohio's wineries have become a booming business into the last few years, and the growth is expected to continue over the next five years. It just makes more sense and it is one solid sentence."