What Is Up With the Rampant Use of Comma Splices..

juniper

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The comma splice is never acceptable. It's an easy error to make since we see it so frequently (says she who has been known to use commas as if seasoning with pepper) but it is never acceptable.

(juniper raises hand timidly) - But - it's not a bannable offense, surely? (begging.) ;) Because I am often guilty ... in casual writing such as forum posts ...

I should make more of an effort, though, as it's easy for that sort of thing to carry over into more important official /erudite writings. I don't think it would go unnoticed in editing phases, though. I'd pause over the sentence and think it through.
 
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BethS

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The comma splice is never acceptable. It's an easy error to make since we see it so frequently (says she who has been known to use commas as if seasoning with pepper) but it is never acceptable.

You can use them in dialogue to imitate run-on speech.
 

Skimmer

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I read through publication guidelines recently for a particular press that indicated that semi-colons should be replaced with em dashes. Perhaps there is something of a backlash against forms of punctuation that require a bit of thought or seem too much like English class?
 

NRoach

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I read through publication guidelines recently for a particular press that indicated that semi-colons should be replaced with em dashes. Perhaps there is something of a backlash against forms of punctuation that require a bit of thought or seem too much like English class?

Well, I've definitely seen a backlash against all things English teacher. I don't really know why; there does seem to be a bit of animosity toward bad teachers which seem to try and stifle anything that's not 100% correct.
 

Chase

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You can use them in dialogue to imitate run-on speech.

1. A run-on is a comma splice without the comma.

2. If you mean "rushed speech," then you can't use comma splices for it with any publisher I edit for. :Shrug:
 

evilrooster

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The comma splice is never acceptable. It's an easy error to make since we see it so frequently (says she who has been known to use commas as if seasoning with pepper) but it is never acceptable.

I have seen it used extremely effectively to contribute to narrative voice. It's pervasive in one of my favorite books of all time, a book I read at least once a year. The story would not be the same without them, and I don't think I would like it as much.

And yet I'm extremely irritable about comma splices in factual prose. I loathe them in that context. The trip me up and stop me reading. They sound amateurish.

It depends, in other words.
 
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evilrooster

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Probably if they had sound, they would. But, yep, they sure look amateurish.

Visual/auditory reader difference, I think. Most of what I read, I "hear" in my head. And I find that while small-scale issues like spelling and punctuation catch my visual notice, larger structural issues like sentence structure and rhythm affect my inner "ear".

So prose styles "sound" to me where they may "look" to a more visual reader.
 

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I read through publication guidelines recently for a particular press that indicated that semi-colons should be replaced with em dashes. Perhaps there is something of a backlash against forms of punctuation that require a bit of thought or seem too much like English class?

The Chair of my English Ph.D. dissertation told all of his advisees not to use semicolons or em-dashes.

A wise person on some occasions, I adhered to his advice, then put them all back after the defense.

I don't see the em-dash and the semicolon as always interchangeable, but a commercial hack at heart, I bow to my editors' choices.
 

Roxxsmom

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The Chair of my English Ph.D. dissertation told all of his advisees not to use semicolons or em-dashes.

A wise person on some occasions, I adhered to his advice, then put them all back after the defense.

I don't see the em-dash and the semicolon as always interchangeable, but a commercial hack at heart, I bow to my editors' choices.

Interesting. I don't think of m-dashes as exchangeable with semicolons, but I do tend to use them in lieu of colons in informal writing. I also will use them to create a parenthetical statement upon occasion, when a pair of commas doesn't seem like enough but I don't want to use actual parentheses.

You really don't see parentheses in fiction much anymore.

But yep, if submission guidelines or a dissertation committee says to use them that way, well...

And of course that abruptly interrupted speech inside quotes thing. That's where I use the things most often.
 

Gunga Din

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Some people love really long sentences I notice. That drives me nuts. I tend not to worry to much about comma splices because I have no idea what one is and ignorance is bliss. Here's an example of what drives me nuts:

Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

And that, was his opening line!
 

Jay365

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Writing is a form of communication: if the communication is difficult and the sentences are too long, then the communication will fail and therefore, whether you use commas, semicolons, colons or em dashes -- or mixture of all of the above -- just try to make sure that what you are trying to say is coming across loud and clear.

The best way is to use short sentences. ;)