Master sentence variety, avoid comma splices in essays
Across many college campuses today, writing essays without a massive infusion of comma splices, run-on’s, fused sentences, and other comma errors have become an illusion to majority of students. In my years of experience as a journalist, tutor, and lecturer, a startling revelation I have made is that students commit these egregious errors because they can’t differentiate between a compound sentence and a complex sentence and how they are punctuated.
As a result, if students are encouraged to master the four main categories of sentences in the English language, about 80% of their punctuating dilemma is solved. Here, I must emphasize that I don’t mean statements; what I mean is sentence structure. By sentence structure, I mean simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences....