Is this a run-on sentence? According to a 2008 study, hog farms across five counties in eastern North Carolina produce more than fifteen million tons of manure every year, creating a waste management challenge of epic proportions for county officials. yes no

## Step 1<br />A run-on sentence is a sentence in which two or more independent clauses (i.e., complete sentences) are joined without appropriate punctuation or conjunction. <br /><br />## Step 2<br />In the given sentence, "According to a 2008 study, hog farms across five counties in eastern North Carolina produce more than fifteen million tons of manure every year, creating a waste management challenge of epic proportions for county officials.", we can see that there are two independent clauses. <br /><br />## Step 3<br />The first independent clause is "According to a 2008 study, hog farms across five counties in eastern North Carolina produce more million tons of manure every year". The second independent clause is "creating a waste management challenge of epic proportions for county officials".<br /><br />## Step 4<br />These two independent clauses are joined by a comma, which is not appropriate punctuation to join two independent clauses. <br /><br />## Step 5<br />However, the sentence is not a run-on sentence because the two independent clauses are not joined without any punctuation or conjunction. Instead, they are joined by a comma, which is a grammatically correct way to join two independent clauses.