Advent of Technical Writing: Run-on Sentences

This is the fourteenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

When you see yourself adding two or more commas in a sentence, ask yourself: can this be multiple sentences?

Consider the following sentence:

On December 6th, 2023, Google announced Gemini, a new Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that is able to interact with and answer questions about data presented in text, images, video, and audio.

Read it over again. Does it feel... a bit long? This is a run-on sentence, in which I have tried to string together too many facts in a single sentence. There are several commas in the sentence, some used to separate clauses and others used as part of a list or the date.

Now consider the following text:

On December 6th, 2023, Google announced Gemini, a new Large Multimodal Model (LMM). Gemini is able to interact with and answer questions about data presented in text, images, video, and audio.

Read the text above again. Does it feel a bit easier to read, and say?

In the text above, I made one small change from the previous one: I separated out the text into two sentences. Notably, the second sentence starts with "Gemini". I did this to ensure the next sentence is clearly in reference to Gemini and not the LMM concept introduced in the previous sentence. While I can with greater ease infer that the second sentence is about Gemini, a reader not familiar with Gemini or LMMs may not be able to make that differentiation.

It can be easy to get in the flow of thinking about what you want to say and how you want to say it and lose sight of how long both sentences and paragraphs are taking. Longer sentences are hard to read, even if all of the clauses are directly related, such as was the case above. A balance between shorter and longer sentences is more comprehsible.

When you see long sentences, consider if you can shorten them. When you do, make sure there is an explicit connection between the two sentences. Look out for "This" and "It" at the beginning of sentences you write while fixing run on sentences. A shorter sentence is great, but if a sentence starts with "it" then you may accidentally introduce ambiguity. The reader should never have to ask themselves "but what does 'it' refer to?"