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ACT English 1.3 Punctuation
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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 3. Is that comma being used correctly?

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ACT English 1.3 Punctuation 55719 Views


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Description:

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 3. Is that comma being used correctly?

Language:
English Language

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.

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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