Commas – One Subject and Two Verbs

Sometimes one subject may perform two actions in the same sentence:

   She            woke up           and               gave the world a hurt look.

Subject            verb          conjunction        verb

“She” does two actions in this sentence (“woke up” and “gave”), but “she” only appears once.  In such cases, we usually do not need a comma.  When one subject has two verbs joined by a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so), we do not use a comma:

She woke up and gave the world a hurt look.

NOT She woke up, and gave the world a hurt look.

His words skidded across the living-room floor and landed in her lap.

NOT His words skidded across the living-room floor, and landed in her lap.

She always carries bandages with her but will give them only to bleeding people to whom she has been introduced.

NOT She always carries bandages with her, but will give them only to bleeding people to whom she has been introduced.

In my next entry, I will examine when you do use a comma with a coordinating conjunction.

Resources

The examples in this post were taken from Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Well-tempered Sentence:  A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.  New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.  This is a good book if you are looking for a book with humorous examples of punctuation.

See When NOT to punctuate coordinating conjunctions in the Writer’s Handbook at the University of Wisconson.

“Will” and “Going to”

Both “will” and “going to” can be used to indicate a future action or a prediction.  However, they differ slightly.  We often use “will” for the first time that we think of doing the action; we use “going to” when the action has already be determined, as we can see in the following example:

Riding his bicycle, a little boy named Tom runs over a sharp rock.  It punctures his tire.  He walks his bike home, sees his mother, and asks her, “Mom, could you please fix my tire?”

His mother replies, “I’m a bit busy, but I will fix it in ten minutes, Tom.”

The boy leaves, sees his father, and says, “I have a flat tire; I’d like mom to fix it.”  Before Tom can relate that he has already asked his mom, the father calls to her, “Can you fix Tom’s tire?”

She replies, “I am going to fix it in ten minutes.”

She uses “will” when she replies to Tom because she did not know about the flat tire and made a plan for the first time.  She uses “going to” when she replies to her husband because she has already made a plan to fix the tire.

Having written that, I should note that this rule does not always hold and that many speakers and writers use “will” and “going to” interchangeably. 

Resources

The BYU English Language Center has a simple PDF that outlines some of the differences.

Portland Community College has a quiz.

Myriad

Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands. (New Revised Standard Version, Rev 5:11)

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.  (King James Bible, Rev 5:11)

The use of “myriad” seems to be an issue of world-ending proportions for some.  The web has myriad complaints about the word.  Contrary to some claims I have encountered about “myriad,” it can be both a noun and an adjective.  As a post about comments in the U Penn LanguageLog successfully illustrates, the word has been written as “myriad” and “myriad of” in different contexts.  The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition 2b for “myriad” as a singular noun clearly illustrates that “myriad of” has been used for a few hundred years to refer to “a countless number of specified things,” as we can see in a few of its examples:

1609    A. Craig Poet. Recreations sig. A4v:   “Thus feeling ill, and fearing worse each day, A miriad of mis-fortunes I embrace.”

1720    A. Hill Creation iv. 4:  “God saw her Grief, and, bent to ease her Pain, And ornament her shadowy Reign, Struck out a Myriad of illustrious Sparks, The Gems of Heav'n, her starry Marks!”

1869    ‘M. Twain’ Innocents Abroad xxx. 321: “Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical fires.”

1987    Observer 20 Sept. 46/4:  “A myriad of small, specialist software companies have also been spawned in the new ‘sunrise high-tech’ areas.”

For me, the question of “myriad” or “myriad of” is less important than the question of when to use “myriad.”  The OED tells us that “myriad” comes through the post-classical Latin myriades, meaning multiples of ten thousand or a countless number. 

Use “myriad” to refer to a largely uncountable number of items—unless you are aiming for hyperbole.

Resources

"myriad, n. and adj.". OED Online. March 2011. Oxford University Press. 16 May 2011 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/124538?redirectedFrom=myriad>.

Commas - Appositives

We use a comma or commas to isolate an appositive—words or phrases that describe or clarify the noun that preceded it.  For example, “Einstein” is most famously the name of the exceptional physicist, but it is also less-famously the name of Dr. Emmett Brown’s dog from a high-grossing movie in the 80s, Back to the Future.

                                   Albert Einstein                                   

Einstein the dog

In the following sentence, there may be some confusion about which Einstein we are writing: 

Einstein was well known in the 80s. 

When we add more information to specify the Einstein to whom/which we refer, that information is isolated by commas: 

Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers in the history of humanity, was well known in the 80s.

Einstein, the dog from Back to the Future, was well known in the 80s. 

The extra information may be a single word or a long phrase.  Regardless of its length, the appositive is punctuated by a comma or commas.  If the appositive appears in the middle of the sentence, the appositive has commas surrounding it.  If the appositive concludes the sentence, it has a comma at its beginning and a period at its end:

Our family dog, Spot, lived to be fourteen years old.

My brother’s car, a red convertible, accelerates quickly.

Jennifer Smith, our family doctor, studied at McMaster University.

When Tracy was young, she lived in Upsala, a small town in Ontario.

Resources

Purdue OWL explains appositives well.

You can find an interactive quiz at ProProfs.

Phrasal Verbs

Students often ask me how to decrease their word count for assignments.  Changing phrasal verbs to one-word verbs is an easy way to lower word count and improve writing.

Phrasal verbs consist of a verb and a preposition (such as at, from, and in) or a prepositional phrase (such as in the place of or from doing):

come in

give up

step up

wind up

go out from

put in the place of

take away from

stop from doing

There is almost always a more precise single-word verb that can replace a phrasal verb:

Phrasal Verb                       One-word Verb

come in                        =          enter

give up                         =          quit

step up                         =          intensify

wind up                        =          conclude, tease, arrive

go out from                  =          exit

put in the place of         =          replace

take away from            =          confiscate

stop from doing            =          prohibit

Phrasal verbs add to a word count, but they may also confuse a reader who is not familiar with the phrasal verb.  The preposition or prepositional phrase changes the meaning of the verb.  For example, the meaning of “wind up” may be difficult to discover from the meaning of “wind” and can have completely different senses in different contexts: to conclude an action, to tease a person, or to arrive somewhere.

Find the best one-word verb for the situation.

Resources

The English Page explains how to use phrasal verbs properly.  Learn English Today has a handy alphabetical list of phrasal verbs and their meanings.

The English Club and Stuff have good basic quizzes.  Frankfurt International School’s quiz is much more challenging. 

Exclamation Points!!!

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all.  Look! They say, look at what I just said!  How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention.  If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out.

– Lewis Thomas, “Notes on Punctuation”

 

We must remember that writing projects tone: if we sound too excited or emotional in our writing, our audience may be unlikely to see us as reasonable or credible.  Exclamation points project both excitement and emotion—often unnecessarily, as Lewis Thomas points out:  “If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out.”

Exclamation points are perhaps most frequently used with interjections, words or phrases that exclaim, protest, or command:

Hey!

Look out!

Get off of my foot!

Interjections are usually too informal for academic writing, and exclamation points in general make us seem excitable.  Use exclamation points very sparingly in academic writing.

Resources

Schoolhouse Rock explains interjections well.

Capital Community College has a good explanation of how to use exclamation points—if you do decide to use them.

I highly recommend the Lewis Thomas article “Notes on Punctuation.”  It can be found as a web document on John Lawler’s personal page from the University of Michigan or as a PDF document on Dr. Judith Newman’s Lupinworks.

Fewer and Less

We use fewer for items that we can count; we use less for items we cannot count:

I have fewer students in this class than I had in last year’s class.

My brother prefers less milk in his coffee than his wife does.

How can you differentiate between count and non-count items?  One way is to imagine that you have an armful of the item and that you place the armload on the table.  If you can easily identify each of the items, they are count: oranges, cups, pencils, logs, papers, etc.  If the items are too small or if they would flow off of the table, they are non-count: orange juice sugar, water, sawdust, pulp, etc.

Resources

Merriam-Webster discusses the exceptions to this common rule.

 

Oxford Dictionaries and The New York Times explain this difference simply and they provide good examples.

ProProfs has a good interactive quiz.

Shall and Will

“Shall” and “will” are modal verbs: they must combine with a verb to form a complete sentence.  Consider the following two examples:

1)      They shall forever.

2)      She will tomorrow.

These sentences are incomplete.  What shall they do forever?  What will she do tomorrow? 

When combined with a verb, both “shall” and “will” can indicate the time of an action, here “to live” and “to call”:

3)      They shall live forever.

4)      She will call tomorrow.

Here, “shall” and “will” indicate a future action.  Apart from indicating a future time of an action, they can indicate the stance of the speaker: “shall” and “will” can indicate how the speaker feels about the actions.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language points out that the common explanation of the difference between “shall” and “will” is not valid:

Expression of future

Person	Singular		Plural
First	I	shall	We	shall
Second	You	will	You	will
Third	He/She/It	will	They	will

Expression of will or determination

Person	Singular		Plural
First	I	will	We	will
Second	You	shall	You	shall
Third	He/She/It	shall	They	shall

If this prescriptive rule is not valid, how do you know which modal to use?

Common usage seems to be the best rule.  The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English states that “shall” appears much less frequently in both academic writing and conversation than does “will.”  Many style guides suggest that “shall” can sound more formal, may have specialized meaning (as in legal documents), and might seem more polite when asking consent in the first person (“Shall we dance?”) or even archaic (as in the King James Bible’s Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not kill”). 

“Will” is appropriate for most situations today.

Resources

As you can see from the following links, opinion is not clear on the difference: Grammar Girl and Rutgers. 

The following print resources are quite good.  Fowler offers a simple explanation.  Biber and Huddleston explore modals in depth

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan.  Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.  Harlow:  Pearson, 1999.  Print.

Fowler, H. Ramsey, and Jane E. Aaron.  The Little, Brown Handbook.  8^th ed.  New York:  Longman, 2001.  Print.

Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullman.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.  Cambridge:  CUP, 2002.  Print.