Dolly A Winger wrote:
 
This sentence appears in our school
newsletter this week:
 
 
*The use of technology is not an addition to
the curriculum, it is a change in how
curriculum is delivered. *
 
Could you explain why this sentence and
others like it are, evidently, legitimate
sentences rather than examples of run on
sentences. I see professional authors doing
this type of sentence repeatedly, and I'm
confused by it. I personally would use a
semi-colon  rather than a comma just because
someone taught me that not joining sentences
with commas was a rather basic requirement.
Help!
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In this case, as in many others, we need to
look at what the rules are for. Basically,
punctuation serves one purpose - to help the
reader process the sentence. Like Dolly, if I
were writing the sentence, I would use a
semicolon, primarily because the semicolon
emphasizes the contrast in the ideas. The
writer, however, apparently felt (as do, as Dolly
notes, many others who use this structure)
that readers would have no problem in
processing the sentence with a comma.
Although technically, this creates a
comma-splice, I would not consider it as an
error. (Remember that old rule about not being
able to join main clauses with a comma
UNLESS the clauses were short?) The "is not"
in the first main clause raises expectations of
"It is," and those are the first two words in the
second main clause. Note that, in a sense, the
whole second main clause is a negative
appositive to the first:
 
*The use of technology is not an addition to
the curriculum, it is a change in how
curriculum is delivered. *