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Grammar Hero vs. Villain 13579 Views


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Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:12

In the English language, sentences are constructed with a series of clauses, conjunctions and

00:18

punctuation marks.

00:19

They fight to protect the people from splices and fragments.

00:24

These are their stories. <<dun dun>> Calamitous C. Splice. “The Splicer.”

00:32

A dangerous, hardened criminal, and no one to trifle with.

00:36

Splice is the ringleader of the Run-On Gang…

00:41

…a group of renegade felons who will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy sentence

00:46

infrastructure. But their designs on mischief generally run

00:51

into a road block. The name of that road block?

00:54

Independent Clause. “Indie” to his friends. Indie sees to it that the laws of Grammaria

01:01

are upheld.

01:04

He is surrounded by a team of tough law-enforcers… His brother, Dependent Clause…

01:11

…Comma the Connector…

01:13

…Semi “Truck” Colon…

01:15

…The Conjunction Bunch…

01:16

…and Perry Odd the Period. Together, they fight crimes against grammar.

01:22

But not today. No… today, they are on their way to an essay

01:28

jam session in Perry Odd’s garage.

01:32

Not everyone may understand, but they can crank out some pretty jazzy paragraphs.

01:37

Meanwhile, Splice and the boys have been at it again, trying to make life difficult on

01:42

Indie.

01:43

All of the stop signs have been replaced by commas.

01:46

And who ever stops at a comma when approaching an intersection?

01:49

Well, that’s going to take some time to clean up.

01:58

With Indie left to exchange insurance information…

02:00

…Splice is free to wreak even more havoc. Like removing periods and commas…

02:04

…leaving nothing but two independent clauses stuck together.

02:07

Public indecency. A serious offense. Will Indie and the gang be able to extricate

02:15

themselves from their current situation…

02:17

…Or will Splice and the Run-On Gang conduct even more dastardly deeds?

02:22

They need your help to make sure those sentence villains… serve a life sentence.

02:28

Here’s what you’ll need to know to bring the nefarious Run-On Gang to justice.

02:33

In a comma splice, two independent clauses are stuck together in one sentence…

02:38

…with only a poor, defenseless little comma charged with the job of holding them together.

02:47

Remember – a clause contains both a subject and a verb.

02:51

Ugh. Splice has clearly been reaching into her old bag of tricks. This sentence is a

02:56

disaster.

02:56

To set things right, we could break it up into two sentences…

03:00

…but there may be a better option.

03:02

After all, the two clauses are related to one another, so it would be nice if we could

03:07

keep them together.

03:07

What if we added a conjunction? Or… what about a semicolon?

03:15

Either would be a huge improvement.

03:19

Crisis averted… for now. But our heroes had better get back on the job soon…

03:22

…before Splice and her cohorts start some other trouble…

03:30

Tune in next time on… Laws of Grammar. <<dun dun>>

03:49

 

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