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Student: Professor Flagbag, why did you fail me on my paper?
You said it should be 200 words, and I wrote 203.
Professor: I failed you because your paper was full of sentence fragments and comma splices.
Student: What do you mean sentence fragments and comma splices?
I have never heard those words in my whole entire life!
Professor: Do you know what a sentence is?
Student: Sure. A sentence is a whole bunch of words followed by a period.
I write them all the time.
Professor: Well, sentences certainly have lots of words followed by periods,
but I am afraid there is a lot more to it than that.
Student: You mean like nouns and verbs and all those things?
Professor: Well, sort of.
Gina, have you ever heard of a clause?
Student: Sure.
My Mommy and Daddy used to tell me that he brought presents on Christmas morning,
but I knew it was really them all the time.
Professor: Yes, that is lovely.
We called him Father Christmas actually,
but the kind of clause I am talking about is group of words with a noun and a verb.
Student: Oh. You mean like a sentence?
Professor: Some clauses can be sentences like, "John went to the store."
That is called an independent clause because it can stand on its own.
It doesn't need anything else to make it a sentence.
Student: So, a sentence is like a noun and a verb and a bunch of other words followed by a period.
Didn't I just say that?
Professor: But, there are other kinds of clauses that are not sentences, like
“because John went to the store."
That is called a dependent clause.
Student: But, that has more words in it than the first sentence.
How can it have more words and not be a sentence too?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Professor: It doesn't matter how many words are in a clause.
What matters is whether or not it completes a thought.
"Because John went to the store" doesn't finish a thought.
It creates the expectation of something else to follow,
Student: like the reason why John went to the store.
Professor: You mean "that" John went to the store,
but, yes, you are largely correct.
Student: So, what does that have to do with "sentence fragrances" and "common slices"?
Professor: Sentence fragments and comma splices: Quite simple really.
If you have a dependent clause followed by a period
(Because John went to the store)
you don't really have a sentence.
All you have is a fragment of a sentence.
That is why we call it a sentence fragment.
Student: Wow. That makes sense. I think I actually understand.
Professor: And a comma splice occurs when you join to independent clauses together with just a comma as in,
"John went to the store, he bought milk".
Student: But, what if I want to say that John went to the store and that he bought milk?
What do I do then?
How Professor?
Professor: Simple. You can either use a semicolon between the two clauses,
or you can use a comma with a word like "and”, “but", or "or".
These are called coordinating conjunctions, and they are popping up all over the place these days.
Student: Wow.
Nobody ever told me this stuff before, and I was the valedictorian of my whole high school class.
Is there anything else I need to know?
Professor: Oh, there are a few things, I suppose, but we can save those for another time.
You are, after all, a freshman, so you have at least eight more years of college to go.
Do you have any further questions?
Student: Well, just one.
Why do I have to learn all of these things anyway since I am going to be a rich business woman
with lots of money and a secretary to handle all of this boring grammar stuff?