“Comma Splice” by Mignon Fogarty | 24th June, 2010 | Grammar Girl.
“I decided to write about comma splices because my friend Scott Sigler has a book coming out this week, Ancestor, published by Crown. Over three years ago, when he was publishing an earlier version of the book with a smaller publisher, he asked me to read it for him and be as brutal as possible with my comments. The biggest problem I found was comma splices.
How to Use Commas
Commas are tricky because there are so many different ways you can use them, but one of the most common ways to use commas is to separate two main clauses that are connected by a coordinating conjunction.”
“What Is a Comma Splice?
Comma splices seem to be Scott Sigler’s biggest problem. Here’s an example from page 114 of the original Ancestor book, where one of the characters is talking about a cow named Fonzie:
Sara obviously named that one, she was a sucker for those old “Happy Days” reruns. (wrong)
It’s easy to see in that example why the error is called a comma splice: it’s because the comma is used to splice together two complete sentences when that isn’t the function of a comma.”
Read more via Comma Splice
Write Connections 