The Grammar girl is a malicious person at times. She has the ability to tear apart a piece of writing, right down to the sinew and bones. In this last reading, "The comma-splice", we see all of what to, and what not to do examples for one of the most common literary elements in modern writing, the comma. I am guilty of over a million command splice errors, but I believe that from reading this article I have become, at least a little bit better at using them properly. Rather than hacking away at someone else's mistakes I'll tackle a few of my own using the grammar girl's guidance.
So, I'll look at a few of my own problems and attempt to analyze what's wrong with them while hinting on the reading.
Due to the nature of writing that I find that comma's aren't used in my day to day writing as much as a journalist or English major might. Most of my writing is scientific in nature so a majority of our writing it supposed to be succinct and clear. As a result I tend to throw commas around haphazardly at best and end up doing a fair bit of comma splicing.
For example, I "used" to write a sentence like, "Neurons are the basic unit of the brain, they are essential for all functions of the brain from the most basic, to the most advanced."
This sentence seemed natural at first, but if we look closely there is a comma splice right in the middle, while the subject is the same for both the first and second clause it would be better to separate them with a semi-colon instead of a common, we can do this because they are related by subject. The common in the second fine however and doesn't require any change. Even though these are small changes I feel that reading these types of articles really helps me to become a better writer.
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