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In the English language, sentences are constructed with a series of clauses, conjunctions and

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punctuation marks.

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They fight to protect the people from splices and fragments.

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These are their stories. <<dun dun>> Calamitous C. Splice. “The Splicer.”

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A dangerous, hardened criminal, and no one to trifle with.

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Splice is the ringleader of the Run-On Gang…

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…a group of renegade felons who will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy sentence

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infrastructure. But their designs on mischief generally run

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into a road block. The name of that road block?

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Independent Clause. “Indie” to his friends. Indie sees to it that the laws of Grammaria

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are upheld.

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He is surrounded by a team of tough law-enforcers… His brother, Dependent Clause…

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…Comma the Connector…

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…Semi “Truck” Colon…

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…The Conjunction Bunch…

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…and Perry Odd the Period. Together, they fight crimes against grammar.

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But not today. No… today, they are on their way to an essay

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jam session in Perry Odd’s garage.

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Not everyone may understand, but they can crank out some pretty jazzy paragraphs.

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Meanwhile, Splice and the boys have been at it again, trying to make life difficult on

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Indie.

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All of the stop signs have been replaced by commas.

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And who ever stops at a comma when approaching an intersection?

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Well, that’s going to take some time to clean up.

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With Indie left to exchange insurance information…

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…Splice is free to wreak even more havoc. Like removing periods and commas…

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…leaving nothing but two independent clauses stuck together.

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Public indecency. A serious offense. Will Indie and the gang be able to extricate

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themselves from their current situation…

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…Or will Splice and the Run-On Gang conduct even more dastardly deeds?

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They need your help to make sure those sentence villains… serve a life sentence.

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Here’s what you’ll need to know to bring the nefarious Run-On Gang to justice.

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In a comma splice, two independent clauses are stuck together in one sentence…

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…with only a poor, defenseless little comma charged with the job of holding them together.

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Remember – a clause contains both a subject and a verb.

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Ugh. Splice has clearly been reaching into her old bag of tricks. This sentence is a

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disaster.

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To set things right, we could break it up into two sentences…

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…but there may be a better option.

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After all, the two clauses are related to one another, so it would be nice if we could

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keep them together.

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What if we added a conjunction? Or… what about a semicolon?

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Either would be a huge improvement.

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Crisis averted… for now. But our heroes had better get back on the job soon…

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…before Splice and her cohorts start some other trouble…

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Tune in next time on… Laws of Grammar. <<dun dun>>

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