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I have two favorite sports they are hockey and downhill skiing.

JuanTamad
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  • Welcome to EL&U. What is a run-on sentence as you understand it? Who tells you that it is not one? Please take the site tour and review the help center for additional guidance on how to write answerable questions here. – choster Jan 04 '15 at 06:47

1 Answers1

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But it is a run-on sentence. It contains two statements, or independent clauses, that have no grammatical connection to each other:

I have two favorite sports.

They are hockey and downhill skiing.

You could punctuate it so that the second statement becomes a list defined by the first statement, in which case it no longer counts as a run-on sentence:

I have two favorite sports: [they are] hockey and downhill skiing.

(Here, the "they are" is optional.)

Other possible remedies:

1) Use a dash, a comma, or parentheses instead of "they are":

I have two favorite sports – hockey and downhill skiing.

I have two favorite sports, hockey and downhill skiing.

I have two favorite sports (hockey and downhill skiing).

Which of these modes of punctuation you opt for will depend principally on the pace and rhythm you are seeking to establish (presumably in the context of a longer piece of prose).

2) Use a semicolon as a separator-cum-combiner:

I have two favorite sports; they are hockey and downhill skiing.

Here, the semi-colon turns the second statement into an explanation which underpins the first one.

3) Turn them into two clearly separate sentences, as I did at the beginning of this posting.

Erik Kowal
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