Punctuation Blog

The grammatical rule that takes the most thought for me is the one about essential clauses. I have to read the sentence a couple of times through first, but once I do that, it’s usually easy to tell where the commas need to go. For example: The man who had white hair sat in the front of the bus. Since the important parts of the sentence are the man and where he sat on the bus, and the non-essential part of the sentence is his hair color, the commas would go after “man” and after “hair.” The man, who had white hair, sat in the front of the bus. After reading the sentence once or twice, it should be easy to find out which part of the sentence is non-essential and place some commas around it.

I found an editing mistake on Facebook (which was fairly easy to do), and I picked it because it had a couple of issues and will hopefully make some of you laugh! I usually see a lot of grammatical errors on KSL News, but I was unable to find a great example today.

This is incorrect for a couple of reasons. First of all, “mate” needs to be possessive and “Cat” should not be capitalized. I guess this could be correct, but I think that “So” should not start a new sentence, but rather continue the first. Finally, the sentence needs to end with a period. It should read like this:

“My mate’s cat lost his eye in a fight a while back, so he gave him a false one to give his confidence a little boost.”

I'm excited to see the punctuation errors you all found (but hopefully not in my post :/).