Combating Run-ons
Consider the image above. It makes sense but is unnecessarily jumbled and disordered. Your audience can figure out writing if you have run-ons and comma splices, but we want to clean up our writing and make reading as easy as possible for our audience.
One of the biggest tricks I like to give students is the "but/and scan." Students need to go through a few simple steps and make sure they don't get sloppy with their writing.
Compound Sentence Commas
1. Skim your paper, looking only “and” or “but”
(advanced search also look for nor so, for, or, and yet.)
2. Stop at each of these words to see whether there is an independent clause (a complete sentence), on both sides of it. (remember the game: a sentence has a subject and a predicate.)
3. If so, place a comma before the coordinating conjunction.