We did adjectives! Everyone, take a moment. Yeah.

OK, this one is nice and easy, and you should be able to read this one while, I don't know, mowing the lawn? Fighting the troll king? Smooching the handsome prince or princess? All three at once?

Anyway, this time we're going to treat ourselves to run-on sentences. Show rather than tell: here's a run-on. This is a common-or-garden 'fused' run-on.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb the penguins played their crazy melody.

The fused run-on is nice and easy, because it's so obviously wrong. We can see that it's two clauses badly welded together. And that's all a run-on is: it's a sentence which has been improperly assembled from smaller component sentences. A fused one is where they just got slammed into each other, and left, smoking.

Before we go in too deep, it's worth taking a moment to remind ourselves of something: you don't worry about this on pass one. Pass one is about getting down your work down. You edit much later. So if your first draft doesn't have one well-formed sentence, then, well done, because you have a finished first draft that you can then fix (plus if you really have managed to make every one of your sentences broken, you may have just written the next great piece of modernist literature). Fixing run-ons is a very late-stage thing.

Great, we've done the insurance advert caveat. So how do we fix?

It's pretty obvious. We either split into the sub-sentences, or we fix the join. Splitting is easy. Stick a full stop in, boom.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb. The penguins played their crazy melody.

Fixing the join is harder, and is something I get wrong a lot. Your two options are a semicolon, or a conjunction and a comma. Compare and contrast.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb; the penguins played their crazy melody.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb, while the penguins played their crazy melody.

Now this is when the knives get picked up. Should you semicolon or not? In my experience, this has the highest chance of any topic of inducing stabbing-in-the-throat-with-a-fork level arguments between writers. Why? Because it's deeply personal, we all have different opinions, and everyone's basically correct.

Let's quickly run down the pros and cons.

Semicolons are definitely more terse. You're supposed to use a conjunction with a comma, and that adds one extra word. If you try and get the best of both worlds, by dropping the conjunction and using a comma on its own, you end up with a different kind of run-on sentence: it's a 'comma spliced' run-on sentence, because we have two sentences improperly spliced together by a comma.

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb, the penguins played their crazy melody.

Now, everyone will be enraged when they read that sentence. However, half are enraged that it's allowed; the other half are enraged that it's forbidden. Me, I just want to get through the week without finding venomous animals in my underwear drawer, so point your murderous fury somewhere else, yeah? But the fact is, by the rules of grammar, that's technically not fine. And yet, it looks kind of OK.

My theory with comma spliced sentences is that your brain expects them to be the first two elements of a list. So this is completely legit:

Gallagher scrawled his name on the bomb, the penguins played their crazy melody, and the world outside burned.

(Gosh, this chapter the example sentences are bleak, aren't they? Normal service will be resumed soon, I promise...)

This isn't a run-on, because this is a conjunction plus a comma: it just so happens that the conjunction 'and' is mighty, and can carry many other clauses on its sturdy shoulders, all joined with commas, so the first clause gets to tag along for free. I think it's such a standard sight that we can cope with comma spliced run-ons quite naturally, it's like you've elided an 'and'.

But, look. Even if you do use the odd comma splice, you definitely want to use them sparingly. They have, I think, a lazy, sloppy feel: when you use them, it's like you're listening to a stoned hippy with opinions. That's a thing, but maybe not a thing to use too much. So, for the majority of our run-on resolutions, we're back to either the extra word and the comma, or the semicolon. In our list of pros and cons, shorter is generally better, so score one for the semi.

But, my, some people hate semicolons. There is an argument – and, I think, a compelling one – that the little thing alienates some people from your writing. Because its rules are tricksy (and they are more than just breaking up run-ons) and people get them wrong, and dang it, we just don't see 'em in picture books like we do all the rest of punctuation, we're excluding some people's enjoyment. Will your readers throw your book across the room in frustration when they see them? Maybe? Maybe not?

Nowhere is this more debate heated than in dialogue. Should you use semicolons in direct speech? I've seen a man tumbling down a London Underground escalator, blood fountaining from his neck, because he advocated just that. The argument here is that no one pronounces semicolons, so you should never use them when recounting what people say. They will prevent you from writing fluid dialogue.

And yet, and yet, they are so great for a certain kind of pause...

I ran an extremely unscientific study. I grabbed random paperbacks from my bookshelf and flicked through, looking for semicolons in direct speech. My results were that the older and more British the book was, the more likely it was to use them. So if you're writing for American kids? Probably avoid in dialogue. Writing for grumpy old Brits (hello!)? Maybe OK to keep 'em. Certainly the reigning king of semicolons in dialogue is George Bernard Shaw (grumpy old Brit, check), who used them like they were going out of fashion... Which I guess they did?

Which means, score one for the comma and conjunction combo for being the drinking person's punctuation of choice.

So what's the score in semi vs comma and conjunction? The whistle blows, and at full time it's one-all. What should you do?

I like to mix it up. I think of sentence structure as being like the sand walk in Dune: you don't want repetition of rhythm because then the sandworm eats you. So a short sentence here, a long one with a semi here, a conjunction with a comma, then a couple of shorties. Or whatever. And, when in action, generally go for short sentences only, so run-ons always get split. But this is now firmly into the arena of 'style' and you need to find yours!

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There is one last thing called a run-on. The gloriously named 'polysyndeton' run-on (no, I don't know how to pronounce that, either) is a sentence that is just using too many dang 'and's.

That's not completely true, but you get the idea:

The zombies howled and the hot wind blew and the city lit up brighter than the sun and then everything was silent and the ash fell from the sky.

Formally, what a polysyndeton is a sentence with a heavy use of conjunctions. In the above example, it reads a bit like Molly Bloom's chapter in Ulysses; it definitely needs some cutting up. But, polysyndetons are not all bad: they have a heavy ponderousness to them. They are relentless and emphatic and pitiless. I think they feel like that because each clause has an equal weight to them, so you have this sort of plodding march. We've gone from the delicate dance of textured prose to heavy drumbeat. I use them for finality at the end of action sections. But you clearly have to be careful to make sure they read well – my example doesn't – and the same remedies are available to you as we used previously: commas and conjunctions, or semicolons.

I think I'd change the example to this.

The zombies howled and the hot wind blew and the city lit up brighter than the sun... And then everything was silent, and the ash fell from the sky.

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Run-ons! Sentences made of things rammed together when they perhaps shouldn't be. 'Fused' run-ons are when the clauses are just mashed into each other. 'Comma spliced' is when they are separated with commas with no conjunctions. The mighty 'polysyndeton' is to repeat conjunctions. Fused are generally wrong, comma spliced are a thing that you can get stabbed for having an opinion on (although they are formally wrong according to grammar) and polysyndetons are something to be treated carefully. And we're done. Finished smooching the troll king's lawn yet?

Let your comments run on and on an on! Yeah, that didn't make much sense...