Identify And Fix a Fused Sentence

Fused Sentences and Run-On

A fused sentence is a type of run-on sentence. You have probably heard of run-on sentences before. But what is a run-on sentence? Contrary to popular belief, a run-on sentence is not simply a sentence that is too long. For example, look at this monster of a sentence:

'Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.'

That must have been written by a high school student rushing to meet a minimum word count, right? Wrong, it's actually a famous passage from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, one of the great practitioners of the English language of all time. And it is, technically, not a run-on.

Independent Clauses

Technically, there is no 'maximum' number of words a sentence can be. So what makes a run-on? It all comes down to something called an independent clause. An independent clause is any group of words that can stand alone as a grammatically complete sentence, such as:

I love bacon

John and Mary rushed to catch the school bus

It was 8:30 in the morning

Mr. Andrews assigned a ridiculous amount of homework

Put a period at the end of each of these clauses and you have a complete sentence. But what if you want to combine more than one independent clause together in one sentence for sentence variety and to create a certain effect like Woolf does? Let's take a look:

It was 8:30 in the morning John and Mary rushed to catch the school bus.

This is a fused sentence because the two independent clauses are not joined with any sort of punctuation. So, you're probably saying, then let's just put a comma between them:

It was 8:30 in the morning, John and Mary rushed to catch the school bus.

You're getting close, but not quite. It's not a fused sentence anymore, but it's still another kind of run-on called a comma splice. A comma isn't sufficient to join together two independent clauses. So how do we fix a fused sentence?

Ways to Fix a Fused Sentence

There are three basic ways to fix a fused sentence (and a comma splice too, for that matter). The first is pretty simple. Since independent clauses can stand on their own, let them, by putting a period at the end of each clause:

It was 8:30 in the morning. John and Mary rushed to catch the bus.

You're now grammatically correct, but you're probably thinking 'But I wanted to join them together, so my paper isn't full of short, boring sentences all the time. How do I do that???' Well OK, there are two ways you can do that. The first is to bring back that comma, but instead of leaving him on his own, add a coordinating conjunction such as and, or, but, so, for, nor, & yet.

It was 8:30 in the morning, so John and Mary rushed to catch the bus.

Once again, our sentence is no longer a run-on. But now you're saying 'But I don't want to use a coordinating conjunction!!!!' You're being pretty demanding today, but luckily the English language has anticipated your demand and given a punctuation mark for just such an occasion, our old friend, the semicolon. A semicolonallows you to join two independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction:

It was 8:30 in the morning; John and Mary rushed to catch the bus.

So how do you know when to use each of these fixes for a fused sentence? All three are equally grammatically correct, so the decision to use each one is just a matter of style and up to the writer's judgment.