Bettering my writing abilities

Hello everyone, I am a new member and I wanted to ask for advice.

During a writing class in high school and even now in my general communications class, I struggle with making my writing error free. The first issue that I would really like to work on is comma splice errors. I have no idea what that means, therefore I also don't know how to fix it. If anyone has tips or can help me out in any way, I would be so grateful.

Thanks in advance!

 

To put it another way, it's two complete 'thoughts' joined by a comma. You fix it by using a proper conjunction, such as 'therefore' or 'but', or by replacing the comma with a period.

 

Isn't a semicolon an option?

Tom hates bears, one time he was chased by one.

Tom hates bears; one time he was chased by one.

 

Yep.

 

One way I used to think of this was whether or not, if you heard the two parts of a sentence in isolation, they would make sense.

"I like him, so I got his number" doesn't qualify, ergo no splice.

 

Some people have a bizarre hate boner for semi colons; I suspect it stems from fear of them.

 

I think it's more when people get to high-school/university they discover semicolons exist and start putting them everywhere; especially places they don't belong; so they've become sort of the unofficial badge of the amateur.

 

My impression has always been that Americans supposedly don't understand them, so they're avoided in American books so as not to scare off the readers.

 

I'm partial to em dashes.
I use them with reckless abandon, then—my editor deletes them with recklesser abandon— replacing the graceful stroke of my em dash with a comma, period, or an ugly semicolon.

 

I try to limit myself to just one semicolon per paragraph. Also just one $64 dollar word per page. It's hard out on these streets.

 

You can still make money that way.

 

I used to use parenthesis like mad. Sometimes I would go on multiple parenthetical digressions per sentence. Looking back on it now it's like the literary version of a rambling grandpa story, but the important thing was I had an onion on my belt...

 

Oh, I hate them. Reminds me of business english. You would have a better chance of finding a religious character in a Stephen King book who is not evil than finding a semicolon in anything I write. I think they look ugly on the page.