Someone in an online forum I skim linked to a smut story. Sometimes the spoken flavor of its written words works, sometimes not. Sometimes a grammatical error--not a stylistic nuance--flares out and trips the narrative flow, as here: Someone has told the narrator he reminded her of a basenji. "What she was referring to I guess was my ears, which basenjis, according to the little picture in the dictionary, have big ones and so do I."
That's what I call a which splice. There are comma splices, someone joins two independent clauses with a comma and calls them a sentence. The previous sentence is an example of a comma splice. The which splice is a similar animal, in which the speaker conscripts the "which" as a conjunction. The clause following the "which" may or may not be independent grammatically, but it is usually dependent in thought, as in the Basenji example.
I have not yet come across the which splice in a standard publication. In speech, yes; and then in personal email, where in my experience writing follows speech patterns more than it does in longhand; and now in writing not traditionally published but paid for and on the web.
I don't claim to be a genius of logical syntax and pristine grammar myself. I just found, and I thought had admitted here but I guess not, an email, a posting to an online discussion group, in which I said, "The words now in my head is 'poser' and 'cheat.'" (I was talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, not another journaler, sorry no gossip here.) I think I wrote the sentence with one predicate nominative, decided it needed another, added the other and the -s to "word," but didn't think to change the verb. That's stupid and clumsy.
I do that often--just yesterday I found an instance where I tried to substitute a real verb for a form of "to be." I didn't strike everything I should have, and so I posted "...they were occurred while I read...." That's bad editing compounded by no proofreading, but I create clumsinesses like that too. Also I recently came across something more distressing: I wrote "in their." And I catch myself--I hope always--two or three keystrokes after impaling the possessive its with an apostrophe. But I shouldn't do the impaling to begin with. Anyway, I the pot am aware that the kettle and I are both cast iron.
Except that I am a well-seasoned piece of cookware, I know the benefits of a good oiling, and I don't want rust spots to form or, having formed, to stay. I don't call corrosion character.
Now, having disclaimed, the pot balances on a soapbox to declaim. Using "literally" as an intensifier instead of a modifier hurts, because English loses a necessary modifier to gain yet another intensifier. That's my coworker's particular peeve, but she uses which splices and pronounces the t in "often." A correspondent just bitched about corporate jargon like "thinking outside the box," but also wrote "your welcome" in the same email. I cannot remove the post from my own eye, but I can distinguish it from a mote. I got into a spat some time ago about the relative badness of "I wish I would have done this other thing" but couldn't come up with any examples or--this is my actual point, that I suck as I writer--properly articulate why it's a problem beyond saying "It sounds bad."
Over the past few days I've come across a few examples where that confusion of tense makes for unclear writing, makes syntactically unclear the order of actions when the significance of that order is the thought being communicated. Finally I understood the nature of the problem.
"I wish I would have done this, because if I would have done it, I could have done that as well."
All of the actions in that sentence occurred at the same time. Whereas with correct tense (or is it voice?), their order is clear: "I wish I had done this, because if I had, I could have done that as well." It's not just a wordier way to phrase the same tense, as "I am doing this" and "I do this" are. It's a different meaning.
So. I can be technically correct, if I try. More often I am blowsy and run on. More important, even when I am technically correct and, rarely, concise, I do not communicate a thought well. Effectively, evocatively, meaningfully, lastingly well. But I can damn well edit somebody else.