Grammar Girl 49, The Dreaded Run on Sentence

I hate run on sentences. I try everything in my ability to break up run on sentences as much as possible. In general when I try to break up sentences I use the good old fashioned period, it’s a classic and it works. Recently, I have begun to dabble in using another interesting tool, the semicolon. My understanding is that a semicolon is used to join two thoughts that could be considered independent clauses except that they share a common theme or idea; I am also aware that semicolons must share the same subject. While my use of the semicolon is usually haphazard it is for any other reason just a way for me to keep myself from comma splicing, which is one of my greatest English writing sins. Because there are so many different ways to write and express oneself through writing, the way that we decide to write things reflects our own individual style, so long as we don’t violate cardinal rules of the language which tend to make things more confusing, i.e. the run on sentence. As the Grammar girls writes, “In most cases, there's no right answer [to structuring a sentence]. You have to determine what kind of tone you want to set.”