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CEOs are overpaid; their payment exceeds their performance, they purposely use their influence to pass plans with larger-than-deserved payment plans, and the compensation of CEOs rewards them even when they are underperforming relative to their peers

I wrote this sentence, and my teacher marked it as a comma splice, but I always assumed that you could use a comma to organize lists. I checked it using grammarly and chatgpt. They both gave clean bills of report, so who is wrong?

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    Try using a colon instead of a semi-colon. Then, you have three parallel statements about CEOs.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 18 at 15:30
  • In addition to starting with a colon, you could replace your commas with semicolons. I think most style guides recommend this when the items in the list contains commas themselves, but in this case it would remove any possibility of interpretation as a comma splice.
    – Doug Warren
    Commented Oct 18 at 16:29
  • Lambie identifies that there are not four list points here, but an elaboration of three listed sub-points adding details after a statement of the whole situation. Lists may comtain commas whether they are lists of NPs, or suitable clauses (including independent clauses). The supercomma usage of the semicolon is not required here, but the list is properly introduced by a colon or dash, as stated. And the listing comma after 'plans' is virtually mandatory in this case.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Oct 18 at 16:41
  • @DougWarren I guess I'll edit to address it, but it should be clarified that using commas in a series in no way creates comma splice.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Oct 18 at 16:43
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    A series of independent clauses is not a "list".
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 18 at 20:29

3 Answers 3

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An answer with a reference:

Observe that you can connect three or more complete sentences with listing commas, as in the Lisa/Juliet example [1] below. Note the difference here:

[1] Lisa speaks French, Juliet speaks Italian[,] and I speak Spanish.

[2] *Lisa speaks French, Juliet speaks Italian.

Remember, you must not join two complete sentences with a comma, but three or more complete sentences may be joined with listing commas plus and or or.

[Larry Trask, University of Sussex, 1997]

I hesitate to give this, though, as Trask goes on to recommend the avoidance of the serial (Oxford) comma in 'BrE', and IMO (and that of many) is far too prescriptive in 'you must not join two complete sentences with a comma'. There are good balanced answers on ELU giving far better recommendations (the Oxford comma can sometimes disambiguate but sometimes add ambiguity, and there are 'comma splice' examples where it would be petty to object).

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    Eat, drink, and be merry.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Oct 19 at 2:10
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No, this is not comma splice. Comma splice is when you use a comma to join two independent clauses, like "CEOs are overpaid, they make too much." A common way to fix it is to turn the comma into a semicolon. If your first semicolon had been a comma instead, you would have comma splice. Meanwhile, the commas that are actually contained in your sentence are unrelated. Yes, we use commas in a series.* If you deleted "CEOs are overpaid," you would still have a valid sentence.

The best action now is to ask your teacher for clarification, preferably giving them a chance to save face if they don't properly understand comma splice. We can only guess at why they marked it as such, but some possibilities are:

  • They hastily mistook the semicolon for a comma
  • They are unclear on the definition of comma splice and simply feel that the sentence is too long and complicated and want a rewording. (Another term for comma splice is "run-on sentence," leading to the common misperception that it applies to "any sentence that is longer than I like.")
  • They're not aware that the semicolon makes it valid.

By the way, I would discourage reliance on AI tools to be sure of whether you're using language the right way. Use them as a safety net to catch mistakes as you want, but double-check their findings by doing your own quick learning about suggested problems, or by asking teachers (perhaps not this one!).

* As some have mentioned, if the elements in a series become very complicated themselves, with internal commas, it might be nice to replace these commas with parentheses. This doesn't really change the way the grammar operates, though. And personally, I feel that when one reaches that point it's time to reword into shorter sentences anyway.

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    I've never used it myself, but my impression is that Grammarly is more likely to give false alarms than erroneous clean bills.
    – Barmar
    Commented Oct 18 at 15:47
  • Not for nothing, but the items in the list do happen to all be independent clauses.
    – Doug Warren
    Commented Oct 18 at 16:30
  • +1 "their payment exceeds their performance, they purposely use their influence to pass plans" certainly looks like a comma-splice given a hasty inspection. Is your argument it is not because there are 3 and not 2 independent clauses metered out as comma-delimitted list?
    – J D
    Commented Oct 18 at 17:35
  • @JD A simpler sentence with the same structure might be: "Bob is weird; his hair is always untidy, he rides a unicycle, and his house is painted purple." Yes, there are ways to create comma splice out of a list (e.g., if the "and" weren't present before the final item). But anyone wearing such restrictive blinders that they can only see two clauses at a time maybe doesn't have any business saying what's going on in the overall sentence.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Oct 18 at 18:28
  • I upvoted; I worry, however, that restrictive blinders are the rule rather than the exception on complex grammatical matters. ; ) Thanks for the feedback.
    – J D
    Commented Oct 18 at 18:31
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You text:

CEOs are overpaid; their payment exceeds their performance, they purposely use their influence to pass plans with larger-than-deserved payment plans, and the compensation of CEOs rewards them even when they are underperforming relative to their peers

The first two independent clauses "payment exceeds" and "they... use" are definitely at first glance apparently a comma splice. This is certainly a stylistic concern, and I suspect there's one style guide out there (probably the AP) that signs off on this sort of construction, but historically, the use of semicolons are frequently used when building a list out of three independent clauses. So a more acceptable revision is more likely:

CEOs are overpaid: their payment exceeds their performance; they purposely use their influence to pass plans with larger-than-deserved payment plans; and the compensation of CEOs rewards them even when they are underperforming relative to their peers.

In this way, the original colon demarcates the translation to an immediately related set of sentences, the semicolons then keep the list "pscyhologically and conceptually" close, and one can use commas freely for comma-delimited lists in phrases such as noun or verb phrases without making the list of independent clauses difficult to parse.

Remember that these sort of questions of grammar prescriptions are best answered by looking to the language community in question, and therefore most language communities who take syntax serious appeal to a style guide. My preferences are The Chicago Manual of Style, but there are other famous ones too and they might disagree over particulars (see the Oxford comma). Steven Pinker, a noted psycholinguist has his own take given his expertise in cognitive science and the philosophy of language and presents his ideas in The Sense of Style, which might be worth a read

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    I would temper the opening bit about semicolons a bit. Chicago recommends semicolons in a complex series: "when items in a series themselves contain internal punctuation, separating the items with semicolons can aid clarity. If ambiguity seems unlikely, commas may be used instead." They're certainly not needed for all series.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Oct 18 at 18:40
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    How can you possibly call this "a comma splice"?
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 18 at 21:09
  • @tchrist Is this a trick question? By misapprehension, a point I delineated with a tad of explicature in the form of 'apparently'. How else do you explain the OP's teacher's rationale? If you're under the impression I characterized it as a comma splice, you'd best reread with an eye for the intricacies.
    – J D
    Commented Oct 18 at 21:25
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    @JD No, that is not a complex series – and it wouldn’t matter if it were, because the deciding factor in whether you should ‘upgrade’ to semicolons is how complex the items in the series are. If one or more of the individual clauses in the series contains its own punctuation, especially commas, then that punctuation clashes with the commas delimiting each item in the series, and it makes sense to use semicolons for the latter purpose. If there is no punctuation inside any of the items (as here), then commas will usually do just fine.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 19 at 11:47
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    My point was that “a series of three independent thoughts subordinate to the semantics of a fourth thought demarcated by colon” is not a construction that automatically requires a semicolon. The example in the question doesn’t, for example, nor does the following: “I had several reasons for going to the park: it was a nice day, I was bored, and my dog needed exercise”. Using a semicolon there would make it feel like you’re trying to be Jane Austen.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 21 at 9:04

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