亚里士多德在《修辞学》一书中说：“自由运行的风格是一种没有自然止境的风格，它的停滞不前仅仅是因为没有更多关于这个主题的东西了”（第三册，第九章）。

这是兴奋的孩子们经常使用的一种句子风格：

And then Uncle Richard took us to the Dairy Queen and we had ice cream and I had strawberry and the bottom of my cone fell off and there was ice cream all over the floor and Mandy laughed and then she threw up and Uncle Richard took us home and didn't say anything.

19世纪美国诗人沃尔特·惠特曼（Walt Whitman）也喜欢这种跑步方式：

The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf, And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there--and the beautiful curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads--all became part of him. ("There Was a Child Went Forth," Leaves of Grass)

《圣经》中经常出现跑步风格：

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew, 7:27)

而欧内斯特·海明威的职业生涯就是基于此：

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. ("In Another Country")

与具有仔细分层的从句的周期性句子风格不同，运行风格提供了连续不断的简单和复合结构。正如理查德·兰厄姆（Richard Lanham）在《分析散文》（Continuum，2003）中所观察到的那样，奔跑的风格让人觉得头脑在工作，一边思考一边思考，句子模仿“漫无边际、联想式的对话语法”

在《新牛津写作指南》（1988年）中，托马斯·凯恩列举了他称之为“货运火车式”的跑步方式的优点：

It is useful when you wish to link a series of events, ideas, impressions, feelings, or perceptions as immediately as possible, without judging their relative value or imposing a logical structure upon them. . . . The sentence style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a film, guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a continuous experience. The freight-train style, then, can analyze experience much like a series of segregating sentences. But it brings the parts more closely together, and when it uses multiple coordination, it achieves a high degree of fluidity.

在《悖论与梦想》一文中，约翰·斯坦贝克采用了奔跑（或货运火车）的风格来识别美国人性格中一些相互冲突的因素：

We fight our way in, and try to buy our way out. We are alert, curious, hopeful, and we take more drugs designed to make us unaware than any other people. We are self-reliant and at the same time completely dependent. We are aggressive, and defenseless. Americans overindulge their children; the children in turn are overly dependent on their parents. We are complacent in our possessions, in our houses, in our education; but it is hard to find a man or woman who does not want something better for the next generation. Americans are remarkably kind and hospitable and open with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle around the man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence.

显然，这种风格在短时间内是有效的。但是，就像任何一种让人注意到自己的句子风格一样，跑动风格也很容易让人厌烦。托马斯·凯恩（Thomas Kane）报道了跑步风格的缺点：

The freight-train sentence implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major; others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on.

为了在我们的句子中表达思想之间更复杂的关系，我们通常会从协调转向从属——或者，用修辞术语来说，从意合转向形合。