Let’s take three simple ideas and arrange them with differing punctuation to see how their effect changes. Imagine an informal email or letter in which you want to say something about these ideas: flying to New York, bad weather, a delayed flight. We call these ideas and not thoughts because there is no one doing anything. All we have is a notion, a general picture of something in our mind, and to get those ideas out of our own mind and into someone else’s, we have to convert ideas into thoughts and put them together in such a way that they say something that makes sense effectively.
An idea becomes a thought when we identify a subject and put that subject with a verb. The first and easiest choice that presents itself, then, would be to put each of these three ideas into a sentence of its own: I flew to New York last week. The weather was bad. The flight was delayed. That’s all quite clear, but quite choppy as well, and since the context we’re imagining is informal, the effect of placing each idea in a sentence of its own might be more dramatic than the occasion requires. We are correct here to call each of these statements a sentence because each presents a complete thought, begins with a capital letter, and ends with a period. But when we get serious about revising and redesigning our words, we have to make use of a more precise distinction that grammarians draw. From a stylistic, or rhetorical, point of view, we call these statements simple sentences; from a grammatical perspective, however, they are independent clauses. A clause is a group of words with a subject and verb, and an independent clause asserts a complete thought in and of itself.
This design of placing short and related independent ideas each in a sentence of its own is called a segregated style, and by isolating the ideas like this, we create focus and force. Drafting simple sentences in a segregated style can be an excellent way to get started with a draft because it demands we know what we want to say: what are we talking about?—the answer will produce the subject of a clause, and what are saying about it?—that answer will produce the predicate of the clause. But we can have too much of a good thing, so if we determine in our revision that this segregated style is not the best effect for the occasion, how can we rearrange the clauses?
Here’s where the distinction between a sentence and a clause is helpful. Since each sentence is an independent clause, we could theoretically just combine them with the coordinating conjunction and to produce one sentence: I flew to New York and the weather was bad and the flight was delayed. But now we’ve gone to the other stylistic extreme, designing one compound sentence so elementary that it flops clumsily before the reader: we have three subjects and each has its verb, but the connection of the thoughts is so loose that all its energy is undirected. And undirected energy is ineffective.
This compound sentence, though, can reveal the next revision. By recognizing that we have connected the three clauses with the conjunction and, we can recall the technique of elision, which replaces an omitted conjunction with a semicolon: I flew to New York; the weather was bad and the flight was delayed. Here we have stated the event with the first clause, keeping the two related circumstances together by retaining the conjunction. Keeping connections close is the basic purpose of a semicolon.
The one choice we could not have made was this: I flew to New York, the weather was bad and the flight was delayed. That is the classic run-on sentence, called run-on because it does just that: the ideas run on one to the next without showing the reader the logical connection. But that’s an easy fix: I flew to New York. The weather was bad and the flight was delayed. And with that one simple change, we might just have found a midway point between the extreme isolation of three sentences and the extreme slack of a rambling one. Such is the work of revision, or seeing again the ideas that first came to mind.
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