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Lesson Plan
Rein in the Run-Ons
Are your students having trouble taming run-on sentences into a more manageable length? In this lesson, your students will learn to not only recognize a run-on sentence, but also how to stop it in its tracks.
Grade
Subject
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Learning Objectives
Students will be able to write complete sentences, including editing run-on sentences for clarity and grammar.
Introduction
(10 minutes)
- Write the following sentence on the board: “Lily loves cats and she loves petting them because they have soft silky fur and she also really loves cats because they are cute and cuddly and sometimes they even sit and sleep on her lap and Lily hopes that someday she will be able to have a pet cat of her very own.”
- Ask the students what they notice about this sentence. Expected responses include that it is long, it has a lot of information, and that it’s hard to understand or stay focused about what the author is trying to say.
- Explain that this sentence is what we call a run-on sentence. The sentence has many complete thoughts joined together to make one giant sentence. There are many independent sentences within the run-on sentence. Writers need to avoid run-on sentences for the reasons just stated. Ask students if they can think of a reason it might be called a run-on sentence.
- Tell students that today they will learn to identify a run-on sentence and learn what to do to make sure their writing does not have run-on sentences.
