Punctuation

This week’s lesson on punctuation was very beneficial for me. For whatever reason punctuation has always been a weakness of mine. This week I learned more about Nonrestrictive clauses.

“Nonrestrictive clauses, phrases and words require commas because they are incidental to the sentence. That is, those elements could be removed from the sentence with little if any loss to the meaning or context. “

Although it may seem simple to most people this concept finally clicked for me! Now I know that as I edit I can look for those elements or phrases that may be irrelevant to the sentence.

I also learned a lot about apostrophes this week. I always find myself questioning the proper way to write about a decade such as the 1990’s. I now understand that “we use apostrophes to indicate that something has been omitted from a word or number.”

I recently found punctuation mistakes while reading an article about Taylor Swift. Please see my example below:

“They dated a few months, but continued to have run ins.”

“In 2014, he helped write a song for duo Alex and Sierra.  The comma in this sentence is unnecessary.

 In chapter 8 we learned that  “Journalists favor dropping commas before coordinating conjunctions if “both independent clauses of the sentence are short, uncomplicated, and meaning is ambiguous.” So in this case the comma is not necessary. 

I am still not completely comfortable with punctuation but I have learned a lot this week. I look forward to learning more this semester and working on perfecting my punctuation skills.