My wife Lara, 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 Lara 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 Lara 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 Lara 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 Lara 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.
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