OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Even though the word “splice” sounds like “split” or “slice,” it means exactly the opposite. To splice is to combine two things, to put them together, usually by attaching them end-to-end. You can splice rope, you can splice wood, you can even splice DNA. Back in the old days, when videos were recorded on strips of celluloid film, editors had to physically splice them together, and if it was done poorly, it could create a continuity problem like a black flicker, a warped image, a jerky transition, or a moment of repetition when the splice passed over the projector. Even when they’re brief, these little hiccups break the flow of visual logic and jolt the audience out of their groove.
A bad splice in your sentences can have pretty much the same effect on your readers, and there’s a very common one known as a “comma splice.” A comma splice happens when you take two complete thoughts, two independent clauses, two lines of text that can stand on their own, and you splice them together with nothing more than a comma in between. That’s not what commas are for, and so you’re setting the reader up to expect something different from what you actually deliver. The result is that same little hiccup in the logical flow of your sentence, one that can jolt the reader out of their groove.
An example would be, “I ate the last waffle, it was delicious.” Those are two independent clauses, two subject-predicate pairings, two lines that can stand on their own as sentences, and we’ve smashed them together around a comma. So how would we fix it? Probably the easiest way is to replace the comma with a semicolon, which is for smashing together two lines that can stand on their own.
Or you could keep the comma and add a coordinating conjunction: “I ate the last waffle, and it was delicious.” Or you could, depending on your meaning, possibly use a subordinating conjunction, a dash, a colon, or parentheses. Or, because each clause can stand on its own, you could just use a period. All of these constructions show slightly different nuances of meaning, and those nuances are signaled by the punctuation, helping to ease the reader through the flow of ideas. The comma splice, on the other hand, is like a sign post pointing the wrong direction, or with the pointer ripped off. At the very least, it makes the writing feel less formal, which probably isn’t a quality you want when you’re putting together a term paper or a business report.
Then again, there are other writing situations where we might want a less formal tone. The comma splice does seem to capture something more colloquial, unguarded, spur-of-the-moment. That’s probably why people use them a lot in text messages, even people who know better. A semicolon in that context might feel too rigid or fussy. Most people don’t speak or think with semicolons, and so the comma splice can make a line feel more like spoken language or internal thought rather than writing.
And in fact, many fiction writers use comma splices intentionally for those exact qualities. Alice Munro uses one in “The Peace of Utrecht” when she has Aunt Annie say, “I washed this by hand, it looks like new.” George Saunders uses one in “The Tenth of December” when he has his narrator think, “This was concerning, this was very concerning.” In both cases, the comma splice makes the line feel like it belongs to the character rather than the author. The characters are speaking and thinking, after all – not writing.
In other words, these writers break the convention against comma splices, but they do it with intention and for a specific purpose. They’re still thinking of how the comma splice will impact the reader’s experience – the same reason they avoid it in other situations.
