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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...
ACT English 1.5 Punctuation 438 Views
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Description:
ACT English: Punctuation Drill 1, Problem 5. What is the correct way to separate these clauses?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Rainy Days.
- 00:08
Although the weather turned rainy and cold, we decided to go to the park.
- 00:18
Well, look at what we have here. A dependent clause leaning on its friend the independent clause.
- 00:25
(Announcer voice) "Will dependent clause be able to survive on its own? Will independent
- 00:28
clause kick him out? Tune in next time, on the dependency project..."
Full Transcript
- 00:33
Alright, well maybe it's not quite that dramatic.
- 00:36
But we know that a dependent clause, as its name suggests, depends on another clause to keep it afloat.
- 00:42
"Although the weather turned rainy and cold," can't act as a sentence by itself,
- 00:47
so it's a dependent clause.
- 00:48
Let's try going through the answers... Will D work?
- 00:51
Well, the comma between rainy and cold is problematic. If you're just saying two items,
- 00:55
you don't need a comma in between them. What about C? There's no comma at
- 00:59
all. You can't just plop down a dependent clause and an independent clause next to each other.
- 01:04
They need something to stick themselves together. Commas are the superglue of clauses.
- 01:09
Let's look at the comma use in B.
- 01:12
A comma is a little pause when you read it. So this sentence, would be "Although the
- 01:17
weather turned, rainy and cold we decided to go to the park."
- 01:22
First of all it just sounds wrong. But there's also not a comma between the clauses, and
- 01:26
an extra one between turned and rainy that doesn't serve any purpose.
- 01:30
Now we're just left with A, and it looks pretty darn good.
- 01:33
No more random, extraneous commas, and the two clauses are separated by one.
- 01:39
Mission accomplished.
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