Are comma splices more common in British English or American English?

Question

To me it seems that they are more common in British English than in American English (and I say that as a Brit). From what I have noticed, American politicians' writing tends to have fewer comma splices than that of British politicians, and comma splices are more common in posts by British users than by American users (no offence to the very many good British writers out there). Further, many of the people whom I know personally (and who for the most part happen to be British) write as though full stops/periods do not exist.

Is it true that comma splices are more common in BrE than AmE, or is it just that Brits tend to use commas more sparingly than Americans? Or is it that I am wrong (a likely possibility, given that I have not been to the USA, having only been exposed to US writing online)?

Answer 1

In the late 1960s/early 1970s there was a fad among educationalists in England for not teaching grammar. I was at school at the time this fad became official and I remember certain teachers saying things like "the new idea is that we are no supposed to teach grammar but..."

The idea was that pupils should just pick up correct English usage naturally by hearing it spoken and that formally teaching grammar was unnecessary and artificial.

There is something in this of course - you don't need to know all the highly technical classifications used in formal grammar in order to speak and write correct English, but...

You can't simply not teach any grammar at all because, if people just rely on copying how others speak, wrong usages gradually creep in. Obviously you need to know some formal rules of grammar so that when you hear usage that doesn't sound quite right you have the tools to work out whether it is or it isn't.

But, like many educational fads, it was taken to the extreme and has resulted in a general lowering of standards of English usage.

Any parent who has children at school will receive letters from the school which are poorly written and grammatically incorrect. The spelling is always fine (spellcheck!) but there are errors of grammar. And poor standards of literacy among teachers obviously perpetuate poor standards in society generally including in official publications from government, councils etc.

If you find this hard to believe just look at the Department of Education website. For example https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-teacher

Teachers usually stay at school for a couple of hours to do marking, planning, admin, or contact parents about any behaviour issues. Some days, the school will have staff meetings or professional development time after the children have gone home.

Some teachers may do some marking or planning over the weekend, but others may choose to fit everything in the working week.

So that is why comma splices are more common in England - standards of literacy in England are in decline.

Answer 2

My first instinct was "This sounds like a job for Google Ngrams!" so here's a brief answer involving that. It's not a complete answer, but it might help you to find a way to answer the question yourself.

Google Ngrams is probably best described here. It's commonly used on here to look up or compare the frequency of terms over time. It tends to ignore punctuation, but a comment by bmende in this answer implies that you can search for punctuation using:

_._

And information from the link before tells you how to use different corpuses. Putting that together, you can search for punctuation in the AmE, BrE and English(fiction) corpuses with this query:

_._:eng_us_2019,_._:eng_gb_2019,_._:eng_fiction_2019

And you can see the results here.

Which shows you that, in general, the English fiction corpus uses the most punctuation and the British English corpus uses the least punctuation. While it's not by any means conclusive, it does somewhat support your statement that the British people you know write as though full stops/periods do not exist.

A better solution would be to download the datasets and search for actual commas. Alternatively, you can look at word combinations where an American author might include a comma (or other punctuation) but a British author might not.