Write a 200 word sentence that isn't a run-on

skylarburris said:

I'll start. Feel free to point out any errors...

Any detached observer, viewing the events of the gruff patriarch's life from a safe yet reasonably proximate distance, might have thought my father (now dearly departed, for he died of a heart attack while driving his unwieldy sedan towards the local Denny's on Route 50, where he planned to enjoy a caloric and fatty breakfast of strawberry pancakes, dripping bacon, slightly golden potatoes, and lukewarm coffee with a group of former coworkers who, like my father, had been forced by an indifferent company—recently acquired by that frugal race the Dutch—into early retirement before the age of fifty) to be a very laconic man ; indeed, he was rather a recluse and never, to my knowledge, willingly sought society, although he did enter sweepstakes, fearing, however, that if by some strange glimmer of chance he should ever win, the prize-givers would bring T.V. cameras to his very doorstep and expect him to act like a fool for the amusement of thousands of commercial viewers, thereby exposing him to the world he had sought so diligently to avoid, a world of people mad enough to desire phones in their cars, when he himself could not tolerate the thought of people calling him at home. ​

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I don't think you should allow the semi-colon, because it really makes it easy to attach two seperate sentences to make the long one, as in your offering. One set of subject-verb-predicate is in black, the other in red. You can connect any number of sentences with semi-colons "legally," but I don't think that's what you were going for, or at least it takes the fun out of it. All you really need is two different hundred word sentences dealing with a continuing story line. But it's your exercise and your rules!

How about this:

Remebering his early years as a moderately successful Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, years when he could take of for eighteen holes of golf at a moment's notice, even when there was a patient lying on the table all gassed up and ready to go, years when driving to work in his bright red Porsche turbo with the top down, tunes blasting from his quadrophinic Blaupunkt stereo and a hot little honey (barely eighteen and suitably enhanced, i.e. a former patient) sitting beside him, properly outfitted in hot pants and a tight tank-top and ready to do anything to please him in exchange for discounted enhancements down the road, years when he felt like he had it all, was sitting on top of the world, was king of the heap, Jim reflected sadly on how his life had changed ever since that day, that fateful, horrible day, so many martinis, hot tubs, and starlets ago when his life had suddenly fallen apart in the space of an hour or so in his office, the day he had tragically tried to enlarge one aging Hollywood star's equipment to a point never before reached, and had it all blow up in his face.

rob

I thought lawyers were the only ones allowed to do this.

Gehanna

Here is my attempt. 203 words.


I see that there are two possible ways I can imagine in which I might accomplish this, neither of which I would ever actually want to use in any book that I would ever hope to traditionally publish and sell, since I can either carefully pack my writing so full of prose as purple as the heather covering the endless wind-swept moors where one would typically choose to set a trite and clichéd romance novel in Regency era Scotland and load it with countless pointless and useless adjectives and excessive unnecessary adverbs to bog the unsuspecting reader down in the horrible, unreadable swap of a sentence like a poor fool who has driven his two wheel drive car into a sticky, gooey patch of Georgia red clay after a torrential, thunderous downpour, or load the sentences with so many subordinate clauses that attempting to diagram of my painfully overloaded sentence would produce a jumble of paper and ink more closely resembling a blackberry bush instead of a fishbone, and using either approach could easily and rapidly result in prose so abominably bad that the judges of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest would complain, “Your writing is too painful to read, even by our standards.”

I have no idea if this is correct, but every word of it was true, and I figured if Ireland could it, than so could I. 225 words.
Today I read a novel, aloud, by William Henry Ireland, about an evil monk, his nefarious plans, the innocent girls he abducted and raped, and the daring heroes who risked life and limb to rescue them from dreary dungeons, dangerous crypts, cruel fiends, and desolation, for my professor, and it was boring, uninteresting, dull, and full of commas, much like this rather long sentence; however, none of the commas were incorrect, (which is odd because I understand that none of the commas were Ireland’s at all, he was very sparse with his punctuation, but rather, each comma was the result of an overzealous printer, who, simply placed commas every where his train of thought was interrupted, and nobody seemed to notice for nearly 200 years, but it should be pointed out that nobody noticed Ireland at all for the past 200 years until my odd professor started writing biographies and critical essays about the man) there was just a great deal of them, as well as other odd punctuation: full colons, several dashes—sometimes the dashes were at the end of the sentence and included a capital, yet, other times the dashes did come with a capital letter, and I won’t even mention the words that didn’t need to be hyphenated at all—exclamation points, random capitalization, and other items that made my eyes bleed.