ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by fibrous one-seeded drupes. Which sound

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suspiciously like an invention of Dr. Seuss.

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Check out the following passage…

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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fruit with

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And here are the potential answers:

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A little punctuation knowledge is necessary to nail down the answer to this question.

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Without it, we’re lost--and we hate being lost.

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We’ll eliminate choice (D) first. It’s incorrect because colons introduce lists,

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emphasize things, or define terms.

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And none of those are happening in this sentence.

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We hereby “sentence” choice (D) to spend some time learning about colons.

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(C) is incorrect too.

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There’s absolutely no good reason to add a comma after “with” in this sentence.

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Breaking the thought there makes zero sense. It’s almost like somebody added a comma

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randomly just to see what would happen.

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This leaves us with choices (A) and (B).

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(B) separates “with” from the earlier part of the sentence with a comma, while (A)

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lets it ride with no comma at all.

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Turns out that (A) wins this round.

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Commas are often used to separate nonessential parts of sentences.

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The phrase that “with” introduces, however, is essential to the meaning of this sentence.

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Without this phrase, we’d have no idea that “a drupe is a fruit with a hard stony cover.”

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And, of course, we’d all be lost without that essential bit of knowledge…

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