The following article was written by Martin Cutts, the research director of Plain Language Commission (http://clearest.co.uk/pages/home), and it appeared in their newsletter, Pikestaff. You can download their newsletters and free guides about plain language -- all in pdf format -- from this page: http://clearest.co.uk/pages/publications.
An error common in business English – but rare in professionally edited work – is the run-on sentence or comma splice, where a comma is placed between two statements that should stand alone as complete sentences. Here’s a typical example in a marketing leaflet:
