Take a look at the sentence again:

My cat Buster loves to nap on warm appliances when he sleeps on top of the television, his tail swipes the screen like a windshield wiper.

For a sentence to be a comma splice, you must have two complete sentences joined with a comma. In the example above, there is no comma. My cat Buster loves to nap on warm appliances is the first sentence. When he sleeps on top of the television, his tail swipes the screen ... begins the second sentence. Because only empty space exists between the two, you should call this error a fused sentence.

Remember that both comma splices and fused sentences are major errors. They make your reader think that you cannot write a correct sentence. Because the sentence is the most basic building block of a piece of writing, comma splices and fused sentences make you look like an amateur!

To fix the problem above, you could put a period after appliances and begin when with a capital W.

Go to the next sentence.

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