Sentence Correction

CAT Exam
Do you ever find yourself going on and on? And on?  Sentences can do the same. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t. Let’s talk about when a CAT sentence is a run-on (grammatically incorrect) and when it’s just very long (but grammatically correct). A run-on sentence is any sentence that smushes two independent clauses together. Let’s take two simple clauses as an example. Clause 1: Sara is wearing a purple shirt. Clause 2: She is wearing pink pants. Both are independent clauses (meaning they can stand alone as their own sentence), but bring them together and trouble ensues: Sara is wearing a purple shirt, she is wearing pink pants. It’s not only a fashion faux pas, but also a grammatical one. So, how to fix it? FANBOYS to the rescue! Any of these seven simple conjunctions will turn a run-on sentence into a compound, and correct, sentence. F For A And N Nor B But O Or Y Yet S So Try it: Sara is wearing a purple shirt, yet she is wearing pink pants. Now you know what FANBOYS are, but it’s time to talk CAT. CAT sentences are often incredibly complex, so we have to break down the complexity. Let’s practice on a much more complicated sentence: After watching the documentary, Joe and Aaron, who had been friends since elementary school, stayed up most of the night talking about the pros and cons of the country’s leadership, which had been the subject of much criticism throughout the movie, they decided that many of the conclusions the documentary made were fallacious. Take a moment to break this very long sentence down to it’s core. Find the main subject and verb . Start by eliminating all the modifiers: After watching the documentary, Joe and Aaron, who had been friends since elementary school, stayed up most of the night talking about the pros and cons of the country’s leadership, which had been the subject of much criticism throughout the movie, they decided that many of the conclusions the documentary made were fallacious. Already, we have a much simpler sentence. Keep breaking it down until you see the main subject-verb: “Joe and Aaron stayed up.” But we have a problem. The last clause is “They decided.” Both of those clauses are independent, so we should look for one of the FANBOYS. Go ahead and look, but you won’t find. We’ve come across the fatal error of this sentence. Insert one of the FANBOYS, and you’ve got a sentence: After watching the documentary, Joe and Aaron, who had been friends since elementary school, stayed up most of the night talking about the pros and cons of the country’s leadership, which had been the subject of much criticism throughout the movie, AND they decided that many of the conclusions the documentary made were fallacious. So Grammar tip of the week in a nutshell: FANBOYS are used to turn run-on sentences into compound sentences.

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