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Julie is a real hypochondriac when her stomach hurts, she is certain that she has a bleeding ulcer, and if she has a backache, she believes that she has cancer of the spine.

A comma splice occurs when two complete sentences are incorrectly joined with just a comma. In the example above, no such comma exists. Julie is a real hypochondriac is one sentence. When her stomach hurts, she is certain ... begins the second sentence, which provides two pieces of evidence for sentence #1.

Because there is only empty space between the two, you should call this error a fused sentence.

To fix the problem above, you could put a period after hypochondriac and begin when with a capital W.

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