The right time to think about punctuation is after one has a good grasp of the basics of sentence structure. This takes the guesswork out of deciding where to place a comma, for example. English grammars and manuals will go on for pages about this particular punctuation mark, so let’s look at a few of …
Tag Archives: Commas
Placing the Comma
Here’s more about the comma, a topic of persistent difficulty to many writers. On more than one occasion lately, I’ve seen a curious decision made about where to place this troublesome mark of punctuation, and I thought an explanation might be in order when it comes to using a comma in conjunction with a conjunction. …
Parentheses or Commas?
Let’s keep to the topic of punctuation and consider how parentheses differ from commas. In another post (Punctuating the Parentheses), we saw that parentheses enclose words that can be meant to stand with, but not directly on, the loadbearing grammatical foundation of a sentence. The parentheses in the sentence I just wrote, for example, created …
Comma or Semicolon?
We have looked in the past at what is called a balanced sentence (see an earlier post entitled Balanced and Parallel), and I recently came upon an example of one that can remind us about an important use of the semicolon. Here are two sentences from Percy W. Blandford’s The Art of Sailing (St. Martin’s …
Comma Because
A lot can depend on a simple comma, particularly when the word because is involved. Consider this unassuming sentence: Because he had forgotten to take his key, he had to break a window to get back into his house. Should there be a comma here? Let’s sort this out. One sure thing about grammar and …