Unfortunately, I recently zapped my entire "saved mail" file, so messages
that folks had sent me individually about the student with the
run-on-sentence problem disappeared into the ionosphere along with
everything else.
 
But I did want to thank the people who sent me suggestions and to report on
what happened.
 
What I wound up doing was a sort of a modification of one of the suggestions
that Joanna (I think it was) made.
 
What I talked with my student about was the notion of a "relationship"
between the subject in a sentence (or clause) and the verb(s) in the
sentence. I explained that a complete "unit" is formed of a single
subject/verb relationship. (Although I also said that nouns were promiscuous
while verbs were monogamous. In other words, in the sentence "Gina ran,
sang, and danced," the monogamous verbs can only have a relationship with
one subject -- Gina. The noun, on the other hand, can consort with all three
verbs.)
 
She was tending to write things like "My mother was very strict, she didn't
allow me to date until I was 17."
 
By having her locate the subject-verb relationships -- and having her note
when a new subject appeared or a new relationship was formed -- I was able
(I think) to get across the idea that
some kind of punctuation was required to note the shift. In the above
example, for instance, she could start a new sentence, use an em dash, use a
semicolon, or link the two "units" with a comma and a conjunction. A huge
change in her writing occurred almost immediately, though I don't claim that
the problem is completely solved.
 
One thing I did think, as I was talking to her, was that I would have been
at quite a loss if she hadn't known what subjects and verbs were; I'm not
sure how I would have proceeded if that had been the case.
 
Wendell
 
 
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"This is not the way I am, but they don't want me
the way I am. So I put my handkerchief on and I am
the best mammy that they've ever seen, and when I
come home I take that handkerchief off." -- Hattie McDaniel
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