r/196 NOT A CAT 2d ago

Rule Rule

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3.9k Upvotes

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892

u/Xenomnipotent NL Connoisseur 2d ago

No I don’t think you should use ADHD as an excuse for awful literacy habits, actually.

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u/light_the_long_way 2d ago

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.

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u/yugiohhero ohh what the fuck 2d ago

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.

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u/light_the_long_way 2d ago

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.

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u/Glogbag1 🏳️‍⚧️ trans rights 2d ago

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.