There are a lot of rules for commas, and
that's why it may seem overwhelming at
first to try to tackle the subject, but I
think if we slow down and we talk
about each rule kind of by itself, then
over time you'll get more used to
commas and they will really help you to
organize your thoughts and create more
complex and interesting sentences. So in
this video we're just going to talk
about some general rules for what commas
do, and then we'll zoom into a couple of
specific rules as well. First thing to
recognize is that we don't use commas
just to indicate a longer pause.
Obviously that's partly why we use
commas, so, if you look at this example,
there's quite a difference between the
first one here (the first sentence), which
reads "Tme to eat mom!" and the second one,
"Time to eat, mom!" If you were to
say the first one,
people might think you're a cannibal,
whereas in the second one it's clear that
it's dinner time or lunch time, or
something like that.
Okay, so the comma does indicate a pause of
some kind, but commas do much more than
that. They create clarity and they
work with clauses and phrases especially
(and sometimes individual words) to set
these units off from the rest of the
sentence. And that's really what we want
to focus on. We want to have a good sense
of the structure of the sentence, the way
the words phrases and clauses work. And
then if we have that knowledge, commas
should actually be quite a bit easier.
So in this video then we're just going to
talk about two of these kind of sentence
patterns and how we can use commas in
relation to them. The first sentence
pattern we will have a look at here is
where we have two independent clauses.
So we're just going to map this out here:
[we start with an] independent clause and then we have
another one later, and we've connected
these two independent clauses with a
coordinating conjunction. And you might
remember the coordinating conjunctions.
They are the "FANBOYS" if you recall, so "or,"
"for," "nor," "and," "but," "and,"
"yet," and "so." Now here's the rule: if you
have these two independent clauses
joined by a coordinating conjunction, you
typically put a comma just before the
coordinating conjunction. And you can see
that in our first example here,
so where it says "Did you have a good
sleep"--that's a complete sentence. You could
put a question mark right there already.
And then we have "or." There is our
coordinating conjunction, and then we have our
second independent clause, which reads
"Were you troubled by bad dreams." What
you can check then is that each clause
is an independent clause. So just read it by itself.
Make sure it has a subject and a
verb, and if it does then you can put the
comma right before "or,"
or before whatever the coordinating conjunction
may be. So so far so good.
You do have to watch out though. If you
look at the second example here ...
It reads, "Tristan hated commas and would
do almost anything to avoid them." So you
can see we have a coordinating conjunction,
but is it really between two independent
clauses?
Well, the first one here has a verb ("hated"),
and it has a subject in "Tristan." It even
has a nice direct object here, so yes,
that's an independent clause. Afterwards
it says "would do almost anything to
avoid them."
You can probably tell that there's a
verb here ("would do"), but who would do?
There's no subject, so the subject is
being carried over from earlier. It's
still "Tristan," but there's no subject
grammatically in this part of the
sentence. As a result we cannot put a
comma before "and" because these are not
two independent clauses joined by a
coordinating conjunction.
What we can do then is just leave the
comma out and carry on with our
sentence. What you are
watching out for here is that sentence
pattern where you have a subject and you
have two sets of verbs. We don't
want to put commas in between these
verbs. This is the basic rule, then, that
we're seeing, but you you can sometimes
depart from it, and that's one of the big
things to learn about commas, [namely] that
these are not always
hard-and-fast rules. The whole point
of writing is that
you learn to write naturally, as is sort
of the mantra for this this website, and
writing naturally means thinking about
what you're actually saying. So you can't
just always say, "Well, here's the rule and
I'll apply it." You have to look at the context,
and so we'll look here briefly at two
more examples that show how sometimes
you're allowed to break the rule. In
the first place, if you look at this
third example here ("my wife loves coffee").
[That's an] independent clause.
"I don't." [That's a] very short clause, but it's still
independent. We've used a coordinating
conjunction between, but because the
clauses are so short we've decided just
to leave the comma out. And that's okay.
[We get to our] last example ... here we go: "Tom built his ...
own airplane." [That's an] independent clause. We have
"but," [a] coordinating conjunction and "failed
to fly it," and you can probably see what's
wrong here. "Failed" is a verb, but it
follows this pattern, so there's no
subject here. The subject is "Tom," which is
over there, and it's on the wrong side of
the coordinating conjunction.
So what should we do about this? Well,
presumably we should not have a comma
here then. That comma should go. But
here's the thing: if you find that comma
sounds better because there's sort of a
gap in between the two parts of the
sentence, especially if time passes ... so we
could sort of see Tom building his
airplane and then many days later he tries
to fly it ...
well, if there's that kind of temporal
gap (or there's some kind of space
between in terms of the ideas) then you
are allowed to put that comma there, and
that's totally fine.
So we have a general rule in other words:
independent clause, comma, coordinating
conjunction, independent clause. But as we
saw, sometimes you're allowed to break
the rule. And that brings us to our
second rule, which is that you're allowed
to use a comma after an introductory
phrase. So in each of these examples
we've used an introductory phrase or
sometimes just a word (can be a longer
phrase as well, and we'll look at this
last one in a moment [as] it doesn't have a
comma). In each case we have followed
up the
introductory phrase with a comma and
there are all sorts of introductory
phrases. So the first one here is a
prepositional phrase.
So "after" is the preposition and "her
shower" is the object of the preposition.
And then we use a comma and we get to
our main clause. Same thing with the
second one (well, it's not a prepositional
phrase this time, but it is an
introductory phrase), and in this case we
have used simply a conjunctive adverb ...
[which] looks a little bit
like a regular conjunction, and it allows
us to nicely introduce the main clause.
The third example here has a number of
phrases, so we start with "having seen the
desire" and "having seen" ...
that's a participial phrase. And
then we also have "in his eyes." ...
"In his eyes" is a
prepositional phrase. So we've got a few
phrases in a row, and when we get to the
end of all these phrases we've added the
comma and then we get to the main clause
after that. Now, as we said before,
sometimes you are allowed to break the rule
and that applies here as well. So if you
find that that introductory phrase blends
very nicely or moves really nicely into
the main part of your sentence, then you
can leave out the comma. And the example
here shows that, so if you were to say "In
the end they lost," and you think, "well,
there really is no pause there. It just
nicely moves into the rest of the
sentence," then leave out the comma and
that's totally fine.
So a couple of rules to start us off with.
Try to master these rules and then we'll
move on to some other rules for commas
in in later videos as well.