What is a comma splice and how do you fix it?

A comma splice is where two independent sentences are joined together with a comma. A sentence should have only one main subject and verb. In a comma splice, two sentences that should be separated by a period or semi-colon are separated by a comma.

A simple example of a comma splice is: He went to school, he went home.

Here you can see that 'he' is the subject of both sentences, but two actions are performed, 'going to school' and 'going home'. These are actually two sentences that have been joined by a comma. There are three easy fixes for this mistake:

• Use a semi-colon instead. He went to school; he went home.
• Use a period instead. He went to school. He went home.
• Use a conjunction such as 'and' or 'then'. He went to school, then he went home.

Read more about comma splices on Wikipedia and check out our free comma splice checker.