ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the class arachnida.

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Guaranteed to cause more trouble than the class clown.

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

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in the araneae order, of the class arachnida?

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And here are the potential answers...

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We’re gonna go out on a limb and say that commas are the most abused members of the punctuation family.

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Everybody is guilty of comma abuse once in a while, but if we work together, we can put it to an end.

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One incredibly useful rule of thumb is that commas are used to set apart nonessential

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elements in a sentence.

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If a sentence works just as well without a particular word, phrase, or clause, chances

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are that element is nonessential.

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In these cases, a comma is needed to step in and keep the nonessential element away

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from the rest of the sentence.

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So for this question, we have to take a good look at the underlined segment and analyze

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whether any of this information is nonessential.

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We’ll read it out loud to help:

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“Spiders are invertebrate creatures in the araneae order of the class

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arachnida in the phylum arthropoda.”

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Secret confession: we only read that aloud because we like pronouncing Latin names.

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Anyway, that all seems essential to us. The writer wants to tell us the order, class,

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and phylum to which spiders belong. No piece of information is more important than another.

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If we took anything away, the meaning of the sentence would change.

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Since everything is essential, no commas are required in this sentence.

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Knowing this allows us to swiftly eliminate options (A), (D), and (C),

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which all include commas.

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Sorry, guys, but the comma abuse has to stop somewhere.

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The correct answer is (B), which uses no commas to separate any of this vital information.

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All this info needs to be stuck together like insects in a spider’s web.

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OK, that simile was a little grim.

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