Sentence Structure Cont'd

On Friday I met with the student who had problems constructing sentences. The meeting went better than I thought it would. The student came, with a distressed look on her face. I did what I could to put her at ease. I told her that although there was a problem with the sentences in her paper, learning how to correct fragment and run-on sentences was a relatively easy problem to fix. I whipped out a grammar worksheet on senteces and went over the definition of a sentence with her. I told her that a sentence has three requirements; it must have a subject and a verb, and it must express a complete thought. I told her that her main problem was that she had several complete thoughts in a single sentence. I asked her to read the first paragraph of her paper to me aloud. This way I could hear whether she blended all the words into a monotonous sentence or accounted for the breaks in thought in her mind. As she read, she paused in the middle of her sentences. I pointed out that pauses indicate that a period or a comma should be included because a complete thought has been expressed. I went over where the periods should be in her first paragraph, and then had her review the rest of her paper on her own. Although she still had a few run-on sentences in the end, she had greatly improved. I could see from this improvement that she was beginning to understand where one thought ended and the next began. I thought that our meeting was successful.