Three bad babble habits and how to fix them

Photo credit: DTL from morguefile.comRun-ons are one of the most common errors I see in academic writing (aka my day job as a scholarly journal editor). PhD programs in English seem to encourage jamming as many ideas as possible between full stops. I once broke an 11-line sentence into FOUR parts. Clearly this was a case of reader distrust--an anxiety that the reader wouldn't comprehend the way ideas were linked unless crammed together. Keep in mind that a paragraph is...