Herculodge

Run-On Sentence, Part Three

My wife Julia was skeptical about my publishing venture. She said, “You’re always writing a book. It seems like every two months you finish one and go on to another. I can’t keep track.”

“Jesus, Julia. You didn't know I wrote Man Points?”

 “Oh, yeah. Is it really getting published?”

I felt snubbed at her cluelessness. I had just finished telling her the day before that my agent Jack Hiatus of The Hiatus Agency had been calling me every day for the last week to tell me how the publishers, close friends of his, were giddy with laughter as they read my nonfiction manuscript Man Points: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Your Manhood in an Era of Shriveling Masculinity. My agent said there was a lot of “buzz” among the publishers and I inferred, safely I thought, that its sale was inevitable. Suddenly, I was feeling very manly. I had marketed myself as a “masculinity expert,” touting my credentials in the book’s introduction:

In my middle-age, I studied jiu-jitsu for a year with the famous Gracie family. Additionally, I have forged friendships with Navy SEALS, British Special Forces operatives, PRIDE fighters and other combatants in mixed martial arts fighting. I have, in short, rubbed shoulders with the world’s most macho men, and I am privy to the irrational impulses, biases, prejudices, and apex predator fantasies that make up the Male Code. From these testosterone-fueled dreams, I have culled the most important elements that make up Man Points so that I can provide a guide for those who feel perplexed by the dizzying labyrinth that makes up the Man Points system.

 

Now I imagined the ringing in my ears would impede my ability to navigate my book tour as I took questions from fans and conducted television and radio interviews.  Furthermore, an “ear condition” and its accompanying dizziness would compromise the masculinity I needed to assert during my book promotion. When I explained these concerns to Julia, she told me I was worrying prematurely. “Didn’t you have a cold a week ago? Maybe the tinnitus is related to that.”

“So you’re denying this eardrum explosion from your Leidecker podcast is the culprit?”

“No. Of course it’s a possibility. I’m just saying we should wait and see if the ringing goes away before you start panicking about your book tour. Plus I don’t see a publishing contract in your hand. Do you?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said.

Run-On Sentence, Part Two

I should have known to shut up when my instincts told me to do so. Instead, I acted like an idiot by arguing with my wife over what constitutes a run-on sentence. I said, “I’ve been teaching for over twenty years. I think I know a run-on when I see one.”

“That’s not how they teach it these days, she said. "When was the last time you took a grammar class? You’re old school.”

“The definition of a run-on has remained unchanged,” I said. Then stopping in the middle of my exercise routine, which is something I never do, I picked up Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers from Julia’s bookshelf and referred her to the definition, which states that the two types of run-ons, “fused sentences” and “comma splices,” require two independent clauses. “The student’s conclusion has only one independent clause,” I said. “Therefore, it cannot be a run-on.” But Julia was defiant. She told me to listen to her latest podcast from Dr. Stuart Leidecker, “Grammarian Extraordinaire.” Donning his trademark hobo dreadlocks and well publicized for studying linguistics while living in homeless shelters for two years, Dr. Leidecker was famous for “rewriting the grammar canon” to “make more sense in our ever-changing world” and Julia had gone to one of his symposiums a month or so ago. I was personally skeptical and even hostile toward Leidecker and his brand of “grammar,” but felt I was in a rather precarious situation regarding this alleged run-on sentence. The delicacy of the situation can be more clearly understood when I explain that grammar between Julia and me is a very volatile issue because eight years earlier when we were first dating I used to correct her whenever she started her sentences with the words, “Between you and I . . .” after which I had to explain to her that the object of the preposition between required that she say “Between you and me” as me is the objective pronoun. I made it clear that I was not normally pedantic but that I felt compelled to correct her since she was in the teaching credential program and she would be well advised to protect her credibility through a scrupulous attention to her spoken grammar. The last thing she needed during an open house was for students’ parents to catch her using the incorrect form of pronouns in her speech. However, for the longest time Julia said “Between you and I” presumably to rebel or perhaps to spite me. This problem escalated during the first few years of our marriage and eventually forced us to go into marital counseling, which was not terribly affordable for me at $150 a session. Several months and thousands of dollars later, we got over our little grammar-marital hump. But in the aftermath I had drained my checking account and harbored some residual resentment over squandering so much money over my wife’s refusal to correctly use an objective pronoun. 

And now a new grammar briar patch, a disagreement over what constitutes a run-on sentence, had raised its ugly head. Fearful of once again being forced to pay a marital therapist to assuage our grammar disputes, I felt I had better indulge Julia on this run-on sentence business. Giving up my workout for the day, I sat at her desk as she put her headphones over my sweaty ears. I then listened to Dr. Stuart Leidecker’s podcast on run-on sentences. It was his mission, he said, to expand the definition of the run-on to include the “reckless stream-of-consciousness that pervades too much of what passes for writing these days.”

As the unctuous Leidecker lectured on the meandering sentences that were proliferating in our era of e-mail and web chatting, the volume on Julia’s headphones inexplicably surged so that my eardrums roared. It felt as if someone had detonated a firecracker right inside my ears. I remember actually thinking of the word “surge” when the incident occurred because the term had been constantly used in the news and talk radio to describe a different U.S. strategy in Iraq that was supposed to put us “back on the right course.”

Overcome by pain, I cursed and with great drama flung the headphones off my head before throwing myself off the chair and rocking on the floor in the fetal position. Julia was standing over me while asking what the hell had happened.

“Your headphones just surged in my ears. My God, there’s a ringing sensation.”

“Did you hear what Leidecker said about the run-on?”

“Jesus, Julia! I’ve just suffered permanent ear damage and all you can do is continue this stupid debate? I don’t need this right now—not with my book tour and all.”

“Your book tour?”

“Haven’t you been listening to me? My book is currently going through a bidding war.”

“What book?”

What a blow to my ego. For the last week, I had been telling Julia about my book deal, but she was so absorbed in her activities that my imminent publishing success had not put the slightest dent in that brain of hers. 

Run-On Sentence, Part One

My wife Julia, a sixth-grade English teacher, was grading a huge stack of essays in her office, which doubles as my yoga-combat-conditioning workout room. We were both in her office on a Sunday afternoon doing our respective duties when Julia interrupted me in the middle of the “downward-facing dog” position to tell me that I had to take a look at a rather infuriating conclusion paragraph, which consisted of one long “run-on” sentence. By “run-on,” I assumed she meant that the student, Sarah Jane Reddit, had written at least two complete sentences joined with no punctuation at all or, erroneously, with commas.  I also assumed that Julia wanted me, a community college English instructor with over twenty years of experience, to share in her exasperation and to give her some cogent advice on how to comment on the grammar infraction, so I stood up and, keeping my legs straight, I bent down and grabbed the back of my ankles to get a good hamstring stretch as Julia placed the student’s essay between my feet. I was then careful to breathe only through my nose, maintaining the proper pranayama, while I read the student’s sentence:

In conclusion, it is essential that drug laws be strictly enforced in today’s society to stop criminals in their tracks and put them behind bars not just criminals but every day people who suffer from really bad addictions and who break the law in order to do their bad behavior so that we can live in a safer better society to protect the children and for all people who need to walk the streets without these kind of worries because without these kinds of strict laws our country would be in chaos and our country’s children will be the innocent victims.

Dizzied by what I had just read,  I then stood up and began doing a hundred deep-knee-bends while holding a 30-pound medicine ball over my head. As I did so, I told Julia that the student’s sentence was an incoherent, elephantine, clumsy, half-baked brain-squirt of gobbledygook. However, I also made it clear that what the girl had written was not, technically speaking, a run-on sentence because to be a run-on there would have to be two independent clauses and the only independent clause I could identify was “It’s essential that drug laws be enforced . . .”

What a moron I was for challenging my wife on this point because little did I know that this disagreement over what defines a run-on sentence would begin a chain reaction that would result in my near death.