Grimmer Girl here, today's show is about how to avoid the comma splice, one of the most

common punctuation errors people make.

I decided to do comma splices today because my friend Scott Siggler has a book coming

out this week, Ancestor, published by Crown, but 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.

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.

That just means that when you join two things that could be sentences on their own with

a word such as and, but or, you need a comma before the conjunction.

For example, squiggly ran to the forest, comma, and ardvark chased the peaves.

In my imagination, peaves are monsters that harass squiggly an ardvark.

So squiggly ran to the forest is a complete sentence, and ardvark chased the peaves

is also a complete sentence.

To join them with a comma, you need the word AND or some other coordinating conjunction.

If you just put a comma between them, squiggly ran to the forest, comma, ardvark chased

the peaves, that's an error called a comma splice or comma fault.

As I said, the comma splices seem to be Scott Siggler's biggest problem, at least his

biggest writing problem.

Here's an example from page 114 of the original ancestor book, where one of the characters

...