GOLDWIN SMITH HALL—After three consecutive years of run-on sentences, one Daily Sun columnist has discovered a new way to pause.
“For years, I’ve been finishing sentences with periods,” said James Stoll ‘23. “Then, my editor told me that my sentences were going on too long and that I needed to find a way to work pauses in there. They told me there was this thing with one period on top of another period called a colon. Unfortunately that didn’t seem to fix much, since it could only really fit in when I was writing lists. But then they told me there was a way to separate independent clauses with only half a colon, and I had to ask, what was the other half? They told me the other half of a semicolon was a comma and that it could separate dependent clauses! That’s wild!”
Following this, Stoll began to use commas in every piece they wrote. Unfortunately, his editor believes he has begun to overuse the punctuation mark.
“His last article was six pages and one sentence long,” complained Ash Sentry ‘24. “Listen to this: ‘I was by a park, which was neat, and then I ran into this professor, who seemed pretty grumpy, and I asked him which department he was from, assuming it was CAS, which he did not like, and then he walked out on me, which I saw as an opportunity.’ I had to edit that sentence alone to make it halfway coherent and it’s still painful to read. I think he might be addicted to commas, but I guess our style guide can’t cover everything.”
As of writing, the Daily Sun has introduced measures to the style guide to mandate writers end sentences a minimum of two times per article.
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