At one point or another, you are bound to make a comma splice. We all have. I make them most often when I’m texting and not paying attention to what I’m doing. It’s not the worst error you could make, but it is one you should avoid in professional writing.
So you know comma splices are a problem to avoid, but do you know what they are? Watch this tutorial video from Texas A&M (2m14s) to find out!
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I’m a big fan of semicolons, so that’s what I usually prefer to connect independent clauses. One thing to be careful of when using semicolons is to not include both a conjunction and semicolon. Thankfully, this is usually pretty obvious, as in “Miss Rev is the First Lady of Aggieland; and she is a beautiful dog.”
However, I find semicolons especially useful in other situations such as when I want to connect two closely related ideas, I link the clauses together with a semicolon and begin the second clause with a conjunctive adverb or transitional phrase, as in: “Miss Rev is a beautiful dog; therefore I took a photo of her.”
Certain lists are sometimes another good place to use a semicolon rather than a comma, but I can never seem to remember the best practice for that. After looking it up again, I found that it’s appropriate to use a semicolon to separate list items when the items use internal punctuation; such as when listing pairs of city and state separated by a comma.
I found this video about comma splices super helpful. I have always heard about comma splices in prior English classes but I was never taught what they actually were. I now have a better understanding of how to avoid comma splicing. Before this video, I feel like in some of my writing I might have used a comma between two independent clauses, however, I should have either used one of those key words, a period (and then start a new sentence), or a semicolon. The two examples that they had in this video (independent clause with an independent clause and an independent clue with a dependent cause) gave me a better understanding of how to improve my writing.
I remember one of my high school English teachers always telling us, ” A comma splice is grammar death.” This video was a good refresher on independent/dependent clauses and the different ways to revise a comma splice. I love using semicolons in my writing, but I have a tendency to overuse them. This was a good review of the conjunctions and “FANBOYS.”
I also remember reading from somewhere that comma splices are grammar death, and It is very easy to overlook them. After watching this, I’m very sure I have abused the use of commas in many of my writings. The video is a great reminder of FANBOYS and the uses of commas.
I found this incredibly helpful because I tend to forget how commas work nowadays. I still have that strong sense of coordinating and subordinating clauses, but studying multiple foreign languages has completely changed the way I see grammar. This video reminded me how to avoid comma splices; I also just looked this up to find extra helpful rules to jog my memory.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/2/1/37/
I thought this was an interesting video because I remember learning all of that in middle school, but as you get older sometimes you forget the technical details of when to use commas. I know that when I’m texting my language and my grammar is very informal. I think that can become a sticky situation if it transfers over into writing informal emails which are not as desirable. Knowing when and how to use commas are some of the small details I know people in the workplace will definitely pick up on.
This video is honestly just what I needed to remember how to use commas properly. I have always been a strong writer but I tend to struggle when it comes to basic grammar rules. Commas are such a confusing punctuation because there’s always a question of whether or not your are using it too much or too little. I actually love referencing this site for comma help when I am writing long articles or essays. It’s got really good examples and covers almost every situation in which you would need to be using a comma.
Thanks for sharing the comma rules link. It looks great.
I actually really liked this video, and hope that we could get more videos like this. It seems as though after highschool proper grammar in writing isn’t stressed enough, so videos like this are especially useful. Before this video I had never heard of the expression FANBOYS, but it is a useful and effective reminded of the words needed in order to use a comma to combine two clauses.
This video is interesting. I use comma a lot because it’s easy to hold a long sentence so that make it strong. But just like the video said, I make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes are just miss typing but sometimes not. Another thing I noticed is that I don’t really know how to use a semicolon. It’s confusing that sometimes the sentence could be separate by semicolon and sometimes it’s just inappropriate.
This is an interesting video. This video helps me remember all kind of rules in an easy way. As an inferential student, this video can help me avoid many grammar mistakes.