How To Use Commas On The Act
In summary commas contribute to the structure within a sentence consequently helping readers interpret the sentence s intent.
How to use commas on the act. And the reason is because the act will often put another word after a comma that is not one of these fanboys and that would. There are some cases where you know you should use a comma such as when separating items in a list but there are other times when you might be unsure whether or not a comma is needed. You wanna memorize these conjunctions. Note the following examples. The oxford comma serves a key purpose here as florence and the machine is one musical act.
The basic purpose of commas is to clarify relationships between phrases and clauses. Use two dashes or two commas. When an adverbial phrase begins a sentence it s often followed by a comma but it doesn t have to be especially if it s short. Without it the aforementioned amazing concert lineup becomes a jumbled mess. Colons semicolons and dashes.
You can also use a comma with a shorter phrase when you want to emphasize it or add a pause for literary effect. In fact this comma is optional. As a rule of thumb if the phrase is longer than about four words use the comma. The comma is the most important punctuation mark to know on the act english test but you ll also need to know the comma s cousins. Here s an overview of how they re used with examples.
Class because she was able to learn c. Commas can be a particularly tricky punctuation mark. The act constructed a sentence like this to trick you into thinking they need to pair up with each other. Let s take a quick look at a sample act question to illustrate this rule. It has nothing to do with the dash.
These 3 punctuation marks are probably the most confusing pieces of punctuation that you will encounter on test day. 4 key rules for comma use on the act. They re used for separate reasons. Luckily you only really need to focus on a few main rules in order to do well on the act. That s a pretty broad goal and there are a lot of different uses for commas.