ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by ancient civilizations. Sorry, if it's a little dusty.

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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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water, called the cascade, forms

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And here are the potential answers...

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The phrase "called the cascade" is nonessential to the sentence. Don't believe us?

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Well, read it without the phrase included.

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"Eventually, a ring of spraying water forms the base."

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See, the sentence hasn't lost any essential meaning even though we snipped the phrase.

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Sure, the fact that these rings of spraying water are called cascades is good to know

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and will make us look cool in Science class.

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But in this particular sentence, the phrase is like those extra appetizers we order because

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want them, not because we need them.

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OK, enough about overeating. Now that we've established that this phrase is nonessential,

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the next step is knowing that nonessential elements in a sentence have to be set apart by commas.

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With this seemingly innocent piece of information, we can swiftly lay waste to the incorrect answer choices.

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Choice (B) places a comma between the words "called" and "the." Not only does this comma

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not enclose the nonessential phrase, it also breaks up the phrase in a way that doesn't make sense.

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Options (C) and (D) also make the mistake of using commas to break up the phrase.

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Dude, who knew commas could be such home-wreckers?

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(C) encloses "the cascade" with commas, and (D) does the same to "called." Neither is

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correct, so they're both getting nixed.

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The right answer is (A) because it takes our advice and walls the entire phrase away with commas.

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We wonder if nonessential phrases ever get lonely in there.

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