That Punctuating Mechanism

I enjoyed the second half of reading about Dora, and the research done on children’s growth as writers. I liked the idea that if we pay attention then we can see what our students have, or have not learned. In addition, learning the idea of sentence structure is such a long and difficult process. I learned that it is going to take students a long time to put their finger on just what it is that they are trying to do, and that it is the teacher’s responsibility to help them do this. However, as teachers we are also in a difficult position. Much of this learning process seems like it needs to be learned by the students in their own time and each individual student will have their own way of responding to the idea of sentence structure.
I don’t remember very much of my own learning process, except for bits and pieces of what I learned each year. However, there is that “punctuating mechanism” within me that makes me want to put a comma here, and not right there. It’s interesting to think of all that now, because everyone has that punctuating mechanism that makes us want to punctuate something the way that we do but each person’s is probably quite different.
One of the reasons that I choose to use a comma in a sentence is because of the pause I hear as I silently read it. Though, there are times that I read a sentence out loud and then choose to take the comma out. I’m honestly not that sure of what makes the mechanism tick, but learning the technicalities now makes me more confident in my punctuating choices.
I’m glad that we were able to briefly go over semi-colons. That was a neat idea to go through the text we were reading and make a lesson out of the writers’ punctuation techniques. I hope we can go over them more in the future, as well as the colon, but it was a good start.

Question: If you had a student who had a tendency to make run-on sentences, what technique could you teach them to help them notice their mistake, and to stop?