Ah, the lovely comma. Commas can be used in a variety of settings, but today we’re going to talk about conjoining two thoughts. We have sentences made of clauses. Clauses can be independent, forming a complete sentence, or dependent, needing more information to stand on its own. When we have two independent clauses, we can join them using a comma and a conjunction — forming a compound sentence. For example:
“We went out for pizza, and we had a great time.”
Both clauses could stand alone as separate sentences, but we’re trying to get across the point that the great time was had while going out for pizza. Here’s another:
“After work, we went out for pizza.”
The clause “after work” is an example of a dependent clause (among other things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet). We’re telling the reader when we went out for pizza, but we’re not expressing a complete statement about it.
Then we have compound predicates — sentences with one subject and more than one verb. Many writers make the mistake of using a comma before every conjunction, but this is grammatically unsound. For example:
“We went out for pizza, and had a great time.”
See what I did there? I deleted the second subject, so now the second clause isn’t a complete sentence. Both “went” and “had” are attached to the first “we.” Corrected, the sentence should look like this:
“We went out for pizza and had a great time.”
Feel free to practice on your own. Create sentences, and play around with the structure. You’ll have your commas down in no time!
