Run-on Sentences

Many run-on sentences may be left as is, as capturing intelligible colloquial speech while not being grammatically correct. Examples:

  • So when I met him he was a committed Christian again and had, I think, the strength of faith to marry someone who was not a Christian, trusting in the Lord that, uh in good time I would come back to Christ, and that is what happened, also in quite a dramatic way.
  • I did a lot of learning, a lot of reading, I was thirsty, I was hungry, I wanted to find out who this Jesus is.
  • And I believe that what happened from that moment on has been His faithful answer to that prayer in that he’s revealed himself in deeper and deeper ways throughout the last thirty, forty years of my life —

    #00:08:23-6# Kerry Magruder Yes.

    #00:08:23-7# Jennifer Floether — starting off with very dramatic immediate experiences, but moving then to this encounter with Robert Walker, through whom I’ve encountered T. F. [Thomas Forsyth] Torrance by, I think a miracle, whose whole way of thinking and writing has transformed me in my mind.
  • So this tradition in theology has overflowed the boundaries of institutions and it’s been mediated to you through a community, through people, and would you say that the way that has happened for you has involved many different aspects of life?
  • I understand that to be part of, part of living out of the incarnation, in other words, we are here, we are meant to be in the world, we’re meant to be in the world, we’re meant to be participating in this reality and, as I’ve heard Robert say often, we’ve got a foot in both realities.
  • So that’s my hope, that there will a come a new wave of young scholars who see it as their task to get outside the scholarly circles and start working seriously to produce material which translates, if you like, Torrance’s legacy into the language of the young people of today, people who can’t think in long sentences —

    #00:12:23-0# Kerry Magruder Mm-hm.

    #00:12:23-3# Jennifer Floether — and whose information so often comes direct from the Internet, we really do need a whole generation of translators.
  • Those were my very small memories of J. B., of his once forgetting his raincoat, after a big dinner he’d attended, and my going up to bring it back to him must’ve been about half past ten in the morning to their house in Morning Side** area, and ringing the doorbell and being ushered into the sitting room.

On the other hand, some run-on sentences might resemble a more stream-of-consciousness discourse that loses intelligibility for the listener. In these cases, adding periods and/or short [inserted phrases in brackets] may help the reader follow the train of thought. Imagine that the reader is skimming along with the transcript while listening. Just as other bracketed comments provide clarity for non-English languages, place names, jargon that might not be intelligible, etc., so such insertions may be warranted to make the meaning of the fragmented sentences clear where possible, yet while still avoiding any idiomatic re-phrasing of the audio recording.