Prescriptive View
Comma splices are condemned in The Elements of Style, a popular American English style guide by E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr.
According to Joanne Buckley, comma splices often arise when writers use conjunctive adverbs to separate two independent clauses instead of using a coordinating conjunction. A coordinating conjunction is one of the seven words: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. A conjunctive adverb is a word like furthermore, however, or moreover. A conjunctive adverb and a comma (or a conjunctive adverb between two commas) is not strong enough to separate two independent clauses and creates a comma splice. For example, "There is no admission fee, however you will be responsible for any food you order," contains a comma splice with a conjunctive adverb. Only semicolons and periods are strong enough to separate two independent clauses without a conjunction.
Grammarians disagree as to whether a comma splice also constitutes a run-on sentence. Some run-on sentence definitions include comma splices, but others limit the term to independent clauses that are joined without punctuation, thereby excluding comma splices.
Read more about this topic: Comma Splice
Famous quotes containing the words prescriptive and/or view:
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)