Trillion-Dollar Diet Plan:

A quick note about run-on sentences

I can't believe I need to say this, but here's a tip for young teaching assistants and the like—particularly in departments like Communications and whatever is left of English—who are apparently trying to educate without being educated:

A sentence is not declared a "run-on sentence" based on its word count.

FUCK, I can't believe I have to say that.

I don't believe in the (child as) noble savage, but I do believe indoctrination is a thing, and ye all are being indoctrinated in the weirdest ways lately—for instance, you seriously seem to think that making you work or think or get bored is a crime.

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE AN INTELLECTUAL. If you get bored in the middle of your student's 100-word sentence, it's 99 percent likely that it is a you problem.

There is no grammatical limit on word count in a sentence.

Instead, there are structural rules. (WHY IN GOD’S NAME DO I HAVE TO SAY THIS?) If you carefully keep all your clauses straight and complete—if your parenths are accurately stacked, and everything is perfectly formed—then, so long as your punctuation is reasonable, you can theoretically keep writing the same fucking sentence till you run out of Internet—and as long as it is correct, THEN IT IS CORRECT. (Some people hate em-dashes and consider them cheating, but I don’t think it’s time for you to worry about that yet, asshole.)

A run-on sentence is called such because the clauses are imperfect, and then they run on into each other. These can be rather short, in fact; for example: “Jane marked the student down because Jane got bored Jane is a very stupid arrogant person I know her she ought to be fired.”

Marking everything that's longer than your attention span as a run-on does not make you look smarter than the student. It makes you look like you have no fucking clue about language. Isn't that your job, though? Language?

Oh, I get it. You’re so in love with the word ‘rubric,’ being the fanciest word you’ve ever mastered, that you think your job is applying ruuuuuuuuuuubrics. You know what a rubric is? It’s a flow chart. You know what a flow chart is? That’s right; you could be replaced by a bot. So maybe you should learn some carpentry.

God damn, sometimes I want to force you all to go a week eating nothing but what you can order in Sanskrit.

If I sold it as a diet plan, I'd be a trillionaire.