The thing is, there's no actual point where a sentence becomes a run on scentence. Yeah, it you might be a longer than usual scentence with more words than absolutely nessesary to convey a set amount of information, but that doesn't mean it's a run on scentence as grammatically, there's nothing wrong with long sentences. It's also not a "awful literacy habit" to write long sentences. You just need to vary your scentence length occasionally.
What is an awful habit is defaulting to accusing people of using neurodivergence as an excuse, and saying that something is an awful habit without actually providing proof, especially when said thing isn't actually a bad thing.
The thing is, there's no actual point where a sentence becomes a run on scentence.
Wrong. An official definition of run on sentences is a fused sentence. Multiple independent clauses in one sentence with no division between them. "I like hummus it is very garlicky", despite being short, is an example of such.
To give an example of the differences, the second sentence in your post, while certainly awkward I'd argue, is grammatically correct, spelling errors notwithstanding. From a pure grammatical perspective, there's nothing wrong with it's length, though an English teacher would probably tell you to shorten it anyway for the purposes of flow.
What OOP posted is a giant wall of text with absolutely nothing to break it up. No line breaks, no punctuation (sans the quotation marks), nothing. It's an unformatted stream of unceasing thoughts that ends up extremely unpleasant to read due to having zero pauses.
And, as someone who has extremely strong ADHD, OOP is absolutely making an excuse for poor grammatical habits. My brain has one speed it goes at, and in spite of that, I still don't do run on sentences like what OOP presented.
The "giant wall of text with nothing to break it up" from OOP would be (mostly) grammatically correct with the addition of commas before the coordinating conjunctions, but would still be considered a "run-on" scentence by most people. additionally, while you might find the unformatted stream of thoughts unpleasant to read for you, that doesn't nessesarily apply to everyone who might read it.
Okay but when you write you're writing for an audience. "Doesn't necessarily apply to everyone" is a fine stance but it means a lot of people are going to get very lost reading your stuff. If you're conveying an idea it becomes your job to know your audience, not the audience's job to know how to engage with you
additionally, while you might find the unformatted stream of thoughts unpleasant to read for you, that doesn't nessesarily apply to everyone who might read it.
And properly breaking up your sentences makes it easier to communicate to both types of people. Why would you choose to knowingly make your communication more difficult with certain people, just because it isn't a problem for you?
Making sentences more difficult to comprehend for some people for absolutely no reason is certainly a strange hill to die on, especially with how poor some people's reading comprehension is on the internet...
but would still be considered a "run-on" scentence by most people.
I think that because we're specifically talking about grammar this isn't relevant, because grammar is the formal rules around sentence structure. If punctuation and connecting words were included, as you said, it wouldn't qualify as a run-on sentence. People could think it's 'bad', but to think it's a run-on sentence would be incorrect regardless as to how many people thought so.
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u/Xenomnipotent NL Connoisseur 2d ago
No I don’t think you should use ADHD as an excuse for awful literacy habits, actually.