Take a look at the sentence again:

Michelle is terrified of spiders, so when she found one in the bathroom, she panicked, refusing to shower for three days to use the restroom, she drove to her neighborhood gas station.

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. She panicked, refusing to shower for three days is one sentence. To use the restroom, she drove to her neighborhood gas station is 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 days and begin to with a capital T.

Go to the next sentence.

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