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The hyphen is used in all sorts of different situations, from making compound words to uniting adjectives to joining prefixes to words that have to...
The Conjunction and the Comma 439 Views
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Description:
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 4. Which conjunction fits best with the comma?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Moby Dick.
- 00:09
I like poetry much more than ancient novels, my brother is exactly the opposite and prefers
- 00:15
Moby Dick to Emily Dickinson.
- 00:21
Look at that sentence.
- 00:22
It's just two sentences that the writer unsuccessfully tried to stick together with
Full Transcript
- 00:25
a comma. Alert, alert, comma splice!
- 00:28
There are two acceptable ways to combine two independent clauses.
- 00:32
With a comma AND a conjunction... or with a semicolon.
- 00:37
There are no options with a semicolon here... so we need to find one of the other choices
- 00:40
that uses a comma with a conjunction.
- 00:43
Let's look at all the answers carefully here. Besides the original sentence, they
- 00:46
all use a comma, and then a conjunction quite nicely. So our job is to figure out which
- 00:51
conjunction is the best for the job. In the sentence, there is a pretty clear contrast
- 00:56
between the two parts. "I like poetry", in contrast, "my brother likes the opposite."
- 01:02
And doesn't really communicate that contrast, and neither does so.
- 01:06
But, on the other hand, works perfectly -- communicating that he does not like this but that.
- 01:12
Here is a general strategy we should take away from this problem.
- 01:16
Read through all the answers before we choose one. If we just looked for a comma and a conjunction,
- 01:21
B would have worked. If we had rushed through this question, it
- 01:23
might have kicked our... but.
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