Tips for Teaching Grammar

Comma Splices and Run-on Sentences:

Identifying Them by Changing Them to Questions

You weren't in class for a whole month, it isn't fair.

Many students may be uncertain whether such a word group is a single sentence or not. To test it, they can try to turn it into a question. They can add a tag phrase:

You weren't in class for a whole month, it isn't fair, is it?

Or they can make it a verb-first question:

Weren't you in class for a whole month, it isn't fair.

Students can usually tell what's wrong in each case: The question mechanism is operating on only one part of the sentence. They can check that they have divided or changed the sentence correctly by checking that each sentence forms one question:

You weren't in class for a whole month, were you?

It isn't fair, is it?

You weren't in class for a whole month, and it isn't fair, is it?

Adopted by Brock Haussamen from Rei Noguchi's Grammar and the Teaching of Writing, NCTE, 1991. Used with the permission of the author.