ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by natural disasters. If you think they're

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bad, you should see what an unnatural disaster looks like.

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

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air, water, and, small objects

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And here are the potential answers...

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Sometimes in life, things are actually easy.

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This question is a much welcome example of that.

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To locate the correct answer all we need to know is that when three or more nouns appear

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in a list, they have to be separated by commas.

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Thus, our eye is immediately drawn to choice (B), which has no commas at all. See how the

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items mush together without commas to separate them?

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If there's one thing that's hated in English language circles, it's mushy sentences.

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So we'll eliminate (B) before it can cause any more trouble.

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Option (D) doesn't do a whole lot better.

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There's no grammatical reason to place a comma between the words "small" and "objects." In

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fact, there's a great grammatical reason to avoid doing this at all costs.

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"Small" is an adjective describing "objects." If we place a comma between a single adjective

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and the word it's trying to modify, we're seriously asking for trouble.

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This brings us to choices (A) and (C). Of the two, (C) is the best answer, since (A)

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needlessly places a comma after the word "and."

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In celebration of this question, we made a list of three items, too:

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1. Get away from these raining frogs!

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2. Get further away.

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3. Stay away.

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