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I get distracted easily when I work from home, but sometimes I am more productive.
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For our purposes however, we are looking at the ways to link two independent clauses.įor the specific sentence that we have been working with, it seems the most appropriate coordinating conjunction to put to use would be “but”. Subordinating conjunctions are a different family of words entirely and are deployed whenever a writer is trying to link an independent with a dependent clause. It’s important not to confuse a “coordinating conjunction” with a “subordinating conjunction”. This is a term to describe the 7 words (and, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet) which you could INSERT into the sentence to fuse the two independent clauses together. Other options exist! Another course of action that works just as well is the “coordinating conjunction”. If for some reason semi-colons are not your cup of tea, there is good news. The grocery store appears to be out of hand soap they’re also out of canned vegetables.Īs you can see above, we have taken the same action – replace the comma with a semicolon and now you have correctly linked the clauses. Let’s see how this solution applies to another sentence – the second of our original examples. The text flows the same, you avoid a run-on sentence, and most importantly, you have not committed any offenses to English grammar. We have replaced the offending punctuation mark ( the comma) with a semi-colon and fixed the problem without having to make any changes to the actual content of the sentence. I get distracted easily when I work from home sometimes I am more productive.Īs you can see, the solution is quite simple. It’s a shame the semi- colon doesn’t get nearly as much notoriety as the comma, especially since there are so many occasions where it ought to be used in place of the comma! Let us revisit one of the sentences used as an example above in order to illustrate this point: The first weapon in your grammatical arsenal is the powerful and yet oft misunderstood semi-colon.
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This of course begs the question – what IS the proper way to express two related thoughts without unnecessarily making a grammatical error? There are actually a few options that would correctly accomplish what the comma splice attempts. How do we fix sentences with a comma splice? However, as we are learning, it is incorrect to fuse the two clauses together with a “comma splice” and express the two sentiments as two parts of the same sentence.
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The front portion of the sentence is clearly related to the latter portion, given that they both refer to the circumstances around working from home in the first instance, and grocery store stock outs in the second. The grocery store appears to be out of hand soap, they’re also out of canned vegetables.Īs you can see in the sentences above, on either side of the comma there is a group of words called an independent clause which, in the absence of the comma, could actually stand alone as a complete sentence. I get distracted easily when I work from home, sometimes I am more productive. One effective way to do this would be to examine the below examples of comma splices. So it’s important to make sure that we accurately call out the comma splice. Since the comma is one of the most prolific and useful punctuation tools, there are many grammatical scenarios in which it is properly used as a means of extending a train of thought while avoiding a run on sentence. In order to fix instances in which a comma splice has been misused, we must first make sure the writer has in fact deployed an erroneous comma splice, and is not simply using the comma as it is meant to be used.
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