Coping with three ideas

 

When there are three complete ideas in a comma splice error, try to rewrite and separate the ideas in sentences that consist of two complete ideas at most.

For example:

He went to the store, he bought milk, he forgot to buy bread.

The ideal solution would be something like this:

He went to the store, and he bought milk. He forgot to buy bread.

OR

He went to the store. He bought milk, but he forgot to buy bread.

Sentences that contain three ideas can become very confusing! They also run the risk of introducing another error that everyone runs from: parallelism errors. So stay simple when possible. Of course, learning how not to make parallelism errors is the next hurdle (but more another time).

Next post: applying the guidelines.