What’s wrong with this sentence?

I love cake, my favourite flavour is chocolate.

It’s a comma splice.

This is where two independent clauses are joined together, wrongly, with a comma. As the clauses can be split into two sentences, a comma can’t be used to join them because it’s not strong enough. To correct a comma splice you can:

• Join the clauses together with a semicolon if the second statement is conceptually close to the first.

I love cake; my favourite flavour is chocolate.

• Join the two clauses together with a comma and a conjunction such as but, so or and.

I love cake, and my favourite flavour is chocolate.

• Turn the two clauses into two separate sentences.

I love cake. My favourite flavour is chocolate.

However, in fiction a comma splice can be used deliberately to add tension and pace to a scene.

He raced through the trees, branches scratched his arms and face.

action beats apostrophes authors checklists clean copy dialogue dialogue tags fiction writing feedback head-hopping overthinking reading self-editing track changes tracked changes writing