Long Compound Sentences

There is no limit to the number of clauses that you can put into a compound sentence. If you wanted, you could put a hundred clauses—or even a million!—into a single sentence. It might not be a beautiful sentence, but as long as you splice the clauses properly, it would still be grammatically correct.

Furthermore, long compound sentences are not necessarily difficult to understand. In fact, compound sentences are a very natural way of speaking, and children often speak in long compound sentences. Imagine yourself talking to a chatty 6-year-old, and you ask her: "What did you do at school today?"

She might reply something like this:

We made paper dolls, and then we read a book, and then we sang a song, and then we played outside, and then we ate lunch, and then I drew a picture, and then we made Christmas decorations, and then we cleaned the classroom.

That sentence is long—(8 clauses!)—and it's certainly not very elegant, but nor is it too terribly painful to read. What makes a sentence difficult is not its length.

Later, we will study some things that do make sentences hard to understand, such as:

• phrases placed between the subject and the predicate.
• subordinate clauses placed between the subject and the predicate.

But don't worry about those things just yet. For now, the key point is this:

It is important to realize that the length of a sentence has nothing to do with whether or not the sentence is a run-on sentence.

Instructions for the Quiz

For each sentence, determine if the sentence is:

• correct
• run-on

Quiz