Run-on sentences and sentence fragments: is the instruction treating the problem?

Abstract

<p>College freshmen, unaware of grammatical rules, write run-on sentences and sentence fragments in their compositions. Instructors justifiably mark those structures in students' compositions as serious errors. By way of remediation, the instructors assign sections in grammar handbooks that tell students both how to avoid and how to correct those errors. But some students continue to write run-on sentences and sentence fragments. What, then, are effective ways to deal with those sentence structure errors in freshman compositions?</p>