Today I gave my students five simple rules:
1) A sentence is a complete thought.
2) A sentence has a subject and a verb.
3) A sentence starts with a capital letter.
4) A sentence ends with an end mark.
5) A sentence makes sense.
Students at the emerging level of written language always seem to struggle with sentence writing, and as they mature, and their spoken language increases in complexity, it sometimes doesn't get any easier for them. Run-on sentences and sentence fragments are a constant bane to middle school writers (and the teachers who read their work).
After giving the kids these rules, I asked them to write five sentences. Upon evaluating the sentences, I told them which rule they had violated, and they were quick to make their corrections.
Later, when they were working on the class blog, they suffered greatly from run-on-itis. I simply asked them to take a close look at the loooonnnnnggggg sentence, and pick out one part of it that made sense. Once they had a part, I told them to use rules 3 and 4 on that part. We went through the entire thing until they were doing it on their own. Our class blog post is run-on free. All sentences have capitals and ending punctuation. And on a strictly grammatical level, it makes sense.
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