Читать книгу Collins Improve Your Punctuation - Graham King - Страница 17

Another common error is the so-called comma splice – the use of a comma in place of a linking word to unite two sentences in the mistaken belief that it will form a single sentence:

The house is large, it has seven bedrooms.

That is not a grammatical sentence, but there are several ways to make it one:

• The house is large; it has seven bedrooms.

• The house is large as it has seven bedrooms.

• The house is large and includes seven bedrooms.

• The house is large, with seven bedrooms.

Simple? You would think so, but splicing a second sentence to another with an inadequate comma is not confined to the inexperienced writer. Here’s the novelist E M Forster in A Passage to India:

Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be found.

One hesitates to correct a master, but surely a full stop is called for after heated state, and either a colon or semicolon after select her. But you really begin to wonder when you find the great stylist W Somerset Maugham scattering comma splices throughout the pages of his novel Of Human Bondage:

… often he sat and looked at the branches of a tree silhouetted against the sky, it was like a Japanese print … ‘You must congratulate me, I got my signatures yesterday …’ ‘I looked in on my way out, I wanted to tell you my news …’

All three splices call for remedial action, with the commas replaced by full stops, or at the very least by semicolons. In the last two sentences linking words such as for, because or as could happily substitute for the commas.