Category Archives: pronouns

How to find run-on sentences

Posted on November 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

Recognizing run-on sentences is hard for some students.  I’ve found one trick that helps students find many of them:  Look for a subject pronoun in the middle of a sentence.  That pronoun could be a clue that the sentence is a run-on. 

Detective with a magnifying glass inspecting a newspaper.The most common pronoun that confuses students is “it.”  And if “it” is followed by a linking verb, that is even more confusing.  Here are a few run-ons using “it”:

Run-on:  I like that video game it is fun.

Run-on:  His arm was long it went into my personal space.

Run-on:  The car kept accelerating it reached fifty miles per hour.

Other subject pronouns within run-on sentences also confuse students:

Run-on:  Jack let me out of the car I breathed a sigh of relief.

Run-on:  Quadralaterals have four sides they are not always the same lengths.

Run-on:  Lincoln was assassinated he died the next day.

Of course, not all run-on sentences contain a pronoun to start the second clause.  But many do.  Students having trouble recognizing run-ons should be trained to look for subject pronouns in the middle of sentences.

But that’s only half the problem.  How does a student fix such a sentence?  One way is to add a comma and the word “and.”  Reread the sentence.  If it sounds okay with the comma and “and,” then the original sentence probably was a run-on.  If it sounds ridiculous, then the sentence might not be run-on after all.

For this method of finding run-ons to work, students need to know what a pronoun is, and what a subject pronoun is.  But the students who have the most trouble with run-ons in my experience have a weak understanding of English grammar.  A pronoun?  What’s that?  A subject?  What’s that?

Good luck.

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Posted in grammar, pronouns, run-ons

Teaching kids to identify two kinds of run-ons

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Not recognizing run-on sentences is a common problem among the middle school students I tutor.  Two categories of run-ons are the most common:  those using a comma instead of a period or semicolon to separate clauses, and those whose second clause starts with a pronoun.

EPSON MFP image

Run-ons which use a comma as the punctuation to separate the two clauses are sometimes called “comma splices.”  Here are a few examples:

  • August runs to his homeroom, no one wants to sit next to him.
  • Julian bullies August every day, Julian even starts the “plague.”
  • August forgives Jack later, Jack says “sorry” to him.

I have tried using sentence grammar to make students see that sentences like these are run-ons.  But that doesn’t work.  The most effective way I have found is to have the student say aloud the clause before the comma.  “Does that sound like a sentence?” I ask.  The student usually knows if it sounds like a sentence or if it sounds “funny.”  Then I have the student say aloud the second clause.  Again I ask if that sounds like a sentence.  We do this over and over.

Run-ons which begin the second clause with a pronoun are another kind I often see.  Some examples are

  • The meanest of all is Julian he puts mean notes in August’s locker.
  • Jack’s friends help them escape they become friends with August.
  • August runs away he has been betrayed by one of his friends.

I ask students who often write run-ons to look for pronouns in the middle of a sentence.  “Read aloud what comes before the pronoun.”  They do.  “Does it sound like a sentence.”  It does.  “Now read the part that starts with the pronoun.  Does it sound like a sentence?”  It does.

For students to identify run-ons this way, they must know what a pronoun is.  Sometimes one or two lessons on identifying pronouns must precede lessons on run-ons.

Students pay attention more when the examples come from their own writing or when the sentences contain their names or those of their friends.

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Posted in comma use, English Writing Instruction, pronouns, run-ons

Neopronouns–what are they?

Posted on April 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

Today I heard a grammar term I have never heard before:  neopronoun.  If you don’t know what I am talking about, you might want to continue reading, because you will be hearing the term “neopronoun” in the future.student thinking about what to write

A neopronoun is a word created to serve as a pronoun without disclosing the gender of the person identified by the pronoun.

Take this sentence, for example.  “Chris ate dinner.”  Now suppose Chris is male.  To replace Chris with a pronoun, you could say, “He ate dinner.”  Or if Chris is female, “She ate dinner.”  But if Chris doesn’t want you to identify Chris as male or female, you could say, “They ate dinner,” or “It ate dinner.”  Or you could use a made-up word to mean a non-gender pronoun such as “Ze ate dinner,” or “Xe ate dinner,” or “Ey ate dinner.”  These made-up words—ze, xe, and ey, for example—are neopronouns.

Ze, Xe and Ey are subject pronouns.  But these and other neopronouns have object forms such as ze/zir/zirself, fae/faer/faerself, and innit/innits/innitself.  If you are wondering how to pronounce these new words, anything goes, at least for now.  With time, some of these neopronouns will stick and become part of our language while others will be quaint relics of our past.  Those that stick will develop standard pronunciations. 

These pronouns are being used by some transgender people (especially young people) to refer to themselves.  If I understand correctly, one transgender person might use one set of pronouns, and another transgender person might use a different set of pronouns. 

Related to neopronouns is the title Mx. (with or without the period and pronounced as “mix”).  You use it as a title for a person who does not want to be identified as male or female, or for a person who considers itself/themselves/xeself? non-binary.  This term dates back to the 1970s and has been included in some recently published dictionaries.

And what is non-binary?  People who identify as not exclusively male or female refer to zirselves as nonbinary.

If all this seems strange to you, I can remember when the title “Ms” was introduced in the 1970s.  What a hullaballoo it created.  Now, it’s as accepted as Mr., Mrs., and Miss.  Soon, perhaps ze or innit will be that acceptable, too.

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Posted in English Writing Instruction, neopronouns, pronouns

Coherence, the most important element in writing

Posted on December 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

Writing well requires following certain steps in sequence:

  • Narrowing your topic
  • Organizing your information, including writing an overarching topic sentence or thesis and subtopic sentences or plot lines
  • Writing a first draft
  • Revising, revising, revising
  • Editing

Once your first draft is complete, revising becomes most important.  So many tasks comprise revising—checking for complete sentences, tightening wordiness, analyzing ideas for logic, honing vocabulary, fixing grammar errors, adding figures of speech and style.  Students wonder where to begin.

Begin with coherence, the most important element of writing.  Coherence means making sure all your sentences make sense and flow from one to another.  Coherence means making sure your readers understand what you mean—easily, at first read, without an interpreter.

How do you do that?  Some ways include:

  • Make sure every sentence in the body paragraphs supports the thesis. If you use an anecdote, make sure it is an example of the ideas in the thesis.  If you use a simile or metaphor, make sure it fits with the topic.  If the topic is igneous rock, for example, the simile “as hot as the steam from a steam boat” is off topic, whereas “as hot as a lava lake” is on topic.
  • If you use numbers (three kinds of rocks, five members of my family, one favorite memory), check that you have named all the numbers and no more.
  • Use logical transitions. “Because” means something causes something else.  Make sure you have named a cause and an effect if you use “because.”  “Finally” means the last one in a series or the last point.  If you have only two or three points, you shouldn’t use “finally.” You should use “secondly,” or “next,” or “third.”
  • If you use a pronoun, make sure you have named the noun the pronoun refers back to. And make sure you have named that noun before you use the pronoun (not “When she fell, Mary broke her arm,” but “When Mary fell, she broke her arm.”  If you use “this,” make sure your reader can know in a word or phrase what “this” refers to.  If “this” is vague or complicated, add a noun after “this” (this situation, this erosion, this loss of interest).  If you have two women talking, make sure if you use “she,” the reader knows which one you are referring to.  Otherwise, use her name or title or position.
  • Check that your sentences are complete thoughts–not fragments or run-ons.  Make sure your complex sentences contain no more than two dependent clauses so readers needn’t hold multiple ideas in their minds at once.  Check that your sentences vary in length, with most more than ten and fewer than 20 words.
  • Change your weak, vapid verbs to active, dynamic verbs.  Eliminate the verb “to be” and passive voice verbs.

If what you write lacks coherence, no matter how specific the vocabulary, no matter how beautiful the description, no matter how lofty your aim, your writing will flop.  Your writing must make sense to a reader without you standing at her elbow explaining, “Well, what I mean is. . .”

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Posted in "to be", active verbs, because, clarity, coherence, complex sentence, English Writing Instruction, flow, good writing v. bad writing, metaphors, number of words per sentence, organizing information, passive verbs, pronouns, readability, revising first drafts, run-ons, similes, thesis, Transitions, word choice

Gender and number distinctions in English

Posted on September 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

Some languages force distinctions which other languages ignore.  And some languages drop distinctions which other languages find useful.

“Call me ‘they’ please.”

For example, the French say “tu”  for “you” when they mean an intimate friend or family member.  For strangers or for formal situations, the French say “vous.”

In English, we say “you” for everyone—friend, stranger, sister—and for singular and plural.  Whereas the French need two words—“tu” and “vous”—English-speakers need only one.

This can bring both a pain and pleasure.  For English speakers learning French, needing to remember when to use “tu” and “vous” can seem a needless distinction.  If one word suffices in English, then why can’t one word suffice in French?

For French speakers learning English, the ease of learning one word, “you,” is a pleasure.  But they might think something is lost—that fine distinction between “tu” and “vous.”  Sometimes “you” might seem too impersonal.

Something of this same forced distinction applies to the new use of “they” to mean the singular as well as the plural.  I get the reasoning and feel sympathy for people for whom gender is not clear cut.  But for me, after a lifetime of “they” meaning the plural, I find it strange that “they” now should include “he” or “she.”

I feel like the French must feel when asked to include everyone in “you.”  Or like Iranians—who have three or four words for “love”—when asked to fit those shades of meaning into one English word.  Or like English speakers with at least nine verb tenses plus modal verb tenses—when asked to express all that nuance into a single Chinese verb.

I wish English had a singular personal pronoun unrelated to gender, something like “it” which could apply to people.  How about “ye”? Or “thee”?  It seems easier to wrap my mind around a new pronoun than to expand and confuse the meaning of a traditional word.

Yet, English, like all languages, changes as new needs arise.  And English speakers, like me, adapt.

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Posted in gender specific words, pronouns, they