Take a look at the sentence again:

At the campus coffee cart, Gini makes the best drinks her sweet cream latte, a blend of vanilla ice cream and espresso, will put on the pounds, but its cool, smooth taste is worth a trip to the gym.

For a sentence to be a comma splice, you must have two main clauses joined with a comma. In the example above, no comma occurs in the problem spot. At the campus coffee cart, Gini makes the best  drinks is one sentence. Her sweet cream latte, a blend of vanilla ice cream and espresso, will put on the pounds ... begins the second sentence. Because there is only empty space between drinks and her, 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 drinks and begin her with a capital H.

Go to the next sentence.

HomeTermsExercisesHandoutsRulesShopFeedback