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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 3. Is that comma being used correctly?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 3. Where does the semicolon fit best?
ACT Math: Coordinate Geometry Drill 1, Problem 1. Which inequality is expressed by the number line?
ACT English 1.3 Punctuation 55719 Views
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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 3. Is that comma being used correctly?
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 3. Is that comma being used correctly?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Wild Birds.
- 00:07
I have always wanted to go to the bird estuary, observing wild birds in their natural habitat
- 00:14
is a passion of mine.
- 00:27
First of all, this thing sounds like two sentences. When you use a comma to join two independent
- 00:32
clauses, or sentence pieces... it's called a comma splice.
Full Transcript
- 00:36
So, let's if we can find another answer with a better way to combine these two clauses.
- 00:41
What about B? This time, the two sentences are joined with the word and.
- 00:45
And is a conjunction, and their buddy is the comma,
- 00:48
and they're pretty much inseparable
- 00:50
when they join independent clauses.
- 00:52
For the sentence to be grammatically correct,
- 00:54
it needs a comma. But beyond that, it doesn't really make
- 00:57
sense to use "and" here. Let's see if we can find a more natural conjunction in another
- 01:02
sentence. C... no way, no how. There's no conjunction...
- 01:06
D looks much more promising. It uses "because" as a subordinating conjunction.
- 01:11
Notice "because" works better than and, because the second clause explains the first
- 01:16
one pretty well. So the answer is D.
- 01:18
And hey, if you get it wrong, you can always try bribing the ACT test administrators with
- 01:24
tickets to that bird estuary...
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