ACT English 1.5 Punctuation
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ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 5. What is the correct way to separate these clauses?
ACT English | Punctuation |
Language | English Language |
Product Type | ACT English |
Punctuation | Commas |
Transcript
Alright, well maybe it's not quite that dramatic.
But we know that a dependent clause, as its name suggests, depends on another clause to keep it afloat.
"Although the weather turned rainy and cold," can't act as a sentence by itself,
so it's a dependent clause.
Let's try going through the answers... Will D work?
Well, the comma between rainy and cold is problematic. If you're just saying two items,
you don't need a comma in between them. What about C? There's no comma at
all. You can't just plop down a dependent clause and an independent clause next to each other.
They need something to stick themselves together. Commas are the superglue of clauses.
Let's look at the comma use in B.
A comma is a little pause when you read it. So this sentence, would be "Although the
weather turned, rainy and cold we decided to go to the park."
First of all it just sounds wrong. But there's also not a comma between the clauses, and
an extra one between turned and rainy that doesn't serve any purpose.
Now we're just left with A, and it looks pretty darn good.
No more random, extraneous commas, and the two clauses are separated by one.
Mission accomplished.