My husband just rushed into our home office with today’s newspaper in his hand. “Did you see this?” he demanded, pointing angrily at a picture on page 2 of the main section.
I leaned over to see what he was so excited about. A brood of cicadas is about to overrun areas on the East Coast of the US. Not an earth-shaking news story, in my opinion. I asked him to explain what had upset him so much about the cicadas.
“Not the cicadas, silly,” he said. “The caption!”
Oh. I understood right away. The article features a photo of a researcher holding a cicada and this impossibly complicated caption:
Gary Hevel, a research collaborator with the Dept. of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, holds up a preserved cicada, a brood of which are expected to emerge this spring in the Washington area, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Camp Springs, Md. on Tuesday, April 23, 2013.
Fifty-two words, a host of facts (who Hevel is and where he works, what he’s doing, the significance of the cicada, where the picture was taken and when), all in one complicated sentence.
Instantly the voice of one of my graduate-school professors began to boom in my head: “One idea per sentence,” he would plead. “One idea.”
Yes. The caption that offended my husband (and me!) would be much better if it were broken into three shorter sentences:
Gary Hevel, a research collaborator with the Dept. of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, holds up a preserved cicada. A brood of cicadas is expected to emerge this spring in the Washington area. The picture was taken at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Camp Springs, Md. on Tuesday, April 23, 2013.
You should know, incidentally, that the original sentence is NOT a run-on. A grammarian would call it a…long sentence. A run-on is a pair of sentences run together that need to be separated with a period, like this one:
Gary Hevel is holding up a preserved cicada, this picture was taken in Camp Springs, Md. RUNON
Here’s one way to correct the run-on:
Gary Hevel is holding up a preserved cicada. This picture was taken in Camp Springs, Md. CORRECT
(BTW, I corrected the subject-verb agreement error when I did my revision: A brood of cicadas IS expected to emerge this spring….)
