Three months ago, I did not know what a comma splice was. I noticed them from time to time and it usually gave me a mild sense of benevolent superiority. Now I know what they are, they really bug me. The irony is that I learned about the comma splice through a blog post that mocks people for being wound up by them.
A comma splice is where a comma is used to join two distinct thoughts: “He ran into the forest, he was pretty scared.”
A more common comma abuse is using one where a complete thought is followed by an addendum: it’s usually more correct to use a colon or semicolon in those cases. For example: “Please do not throw your towels on the floor, use the bins provided.” I don’t know if that counts as a comma splice, since the two clauses are not completely self-sufficient.
This was going to be a post about what a White Person I have become, but I forgot what the other thing was that I started to get annoyed about only after I learned the name for it.
3 comments so far...
The two clauses in the sentence “Please do not throw your towels on the floor; use the bins provided” are fully independent clauses. They’re so independent that they really should be separate sentences.
A friend of mine who was in medical school once asked me, as a trivia question, if I knew what “toxic megacolon” was. I replied that I did in fact know, and used the following sentence as an example:
“Many vitamins are toxic; megadoses can be harmful.”
As anyone can see, the punctuation mark in the middle of that sentence is a toxic megacolon.
Scott
Durn, Im going to have to go back to school and learn this stuff properly (except do they teach this stuff at school these days?)
Apparently you can get an extra mark for punctuation.
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