Run-On Sentence Detector | Grammar Review Tool

Reading is hard when your sentences run on. That’s what happens when a writer connects more than one idea in a single breath. A lot of writers does that. They use conjunctions and commas to link point A to point B to point C. By then, the sentence has run completely off the rails.

This page finds them for you before a reader trips over them. Instead of simply counting words, it look for structural failures. Paste in an essay fragment, a business memo, or even draft chapter. Then it will scan for chains of coordinating conjunctions, fused clauses, and comma splices. How many of those signal does it find? That’s its risk score.

How to Fix Run-On Sentences

Sometimes long isn’t bad, just like sometimes short is bad. The tool tells the difference between intentional and unintentional longness. While both Shakespeare and Hemingway crafted long sentence, their intent was clear. If you’re building your sentence’s rhythm into a peak and stopping at the right place, then that’s a good sentence. But if you didn’t know how to stop, then no.

But it’s flexible enough to work with your writing style; and that makes a big difference. It’s fine to get a little out of control with sentence structure when writing fiction: You’re dealing with a character having a panic attack; she says things in fragments! For regular narrative prose, then, you want to put it on “balanced” mode, where it will accept longer clauses provided they’re properly punctuated.

When you have something like an academic or business document where clarity is most important, you want to go sterner. In those situations, the detector will tighten up its thresholds (it’ll flag sentences that might be acceptable in a novel but would of been rejected in a technical report).

If you write legal briefs, you might want to loosen things up just a hair. Legal writing tend to be pretty complicated based off using conditional constructions that appear to be run-on sentences, but really aren’t.

To correct this issue you should know the distinction between a fused sentence and a comma splice. A comma splice involves simply placing a comma in between two independent clauses. This is a frequent mistake because it sounds like how we naturaly pause our speech.

A fused sentence is even more problematic: Two independent clause have been smooshed together without any punctuation whatsoever. Both mistakes cause confusion for the reader as to where one idea stops and another starts.

The table on the page lists which types of mistake carry the biggest risk. Easy-to-fix comma splices score a high risk rating here (just add a semicolon or period). And while fused clauses also scores a high rating, they’re often so messed up that they need to be completely restructured to make any kind of sense.

Look up your result. If there’s a high-risk score, check out the main issue noted. Is it a chain of conjunctions? Or does the problem lie with too-long sentences? See if you can cut the middle links by breaking up the chain; if not, split at the first conjunction.

The idea isn’t that all sentences must be short, but that all sentences ought to be clear. Long ones don’t necessarily need to be chopped; short ones can be choppy so managing the flow is what matters. Identify where you have lost control using the calculator, then edit for rhythm, not just according to rules.

When you’re finished, read the text aloud. If you didn’t end up gasping for air in mid-sentence, you’ve probably done it right.