The decisions required to follow grammatical conventions often bewilder writers, student or otherwise, and renders even simple writing tasks intimidating. Fortunately, the Sharkwrites website contains an assortment of resources to help develop your knowledge and command of grammar and sentence structure. This week we will outline a few guidelines regarding how to use and place commas. One way to think of when and how to use the commas is to consider the situations in which readers (and writers) find them useful. Consider these scenarios:
When composing a list of three or more items, use commas to separate the items in a series. Including a comma before the word "and" makes it less likely for readers to get confused as to whether the last few words are a single set (i.e. a single dish made of two items, such as "pork and beans") or separate items (i.e. "pork, and beans").
Remember to use a comma after transition words and phrases that begin a sentence, including but not limited to the following: therefore, however, whereas, consequently.
If the middle of your sentence includes a clause that is secondary to the meaning of your sentence, adding extra information but not necessary for having a complete sentence, please use a pair of commas at the beginning and end of this phrase to identify it as such. One way to check to see if this makes sense to do is to try and read the sentence without the part between the commas. The sentence should make complete grammatical and semantic sense without the section in commas, which is being added to the complete sentence to add additional information.
A comma is needed to separate independent clauses united by any of the following conjunctions (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So, or FANBOYS). In other words, if you have two complete sentences that are connected in the middle with a conjunction, you should be using a comma between them (before the conjunction).
Good luck in your writing. Remember, you can often hear" the correct placement of a comma more easily than you can see it, so you might try reading your work out loud to determine if a comma is needed.
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