How To Use Commas On The Act

When an adverbial phrase begins a sentence it s often followed by a comma but it doesn t have to be especially if it s short.

How to use commas on the act. As a rule of thumb if the phrase is longer than about four words use the comma. It has nothing to do with the dash. On the surface it looks like they should pair up but they shouldn t. There are some cases where you know you should use a comma such as when separating items in a list but there are other times when you might be unsure whether or not a comma is needed. Do not use one of each.

These 3 punctuation marks are probably the most confusing pieces of punctuation that you will encounter on test day. You wanna memorize these conjunctions. The act test abides by the oxford comma rule. Without it the aforementioned amazing concert lineup becomes a jumbled mess. So when you use a comma and what s called a fanboy this is an acronym to help you remember for and nor or but yet or so.

Let s take a quick look at a sample act question to illustrate this rule. 4 key rules for comma use on the act. The comma is the most important punctuation mark to know on the act english test but you ll also need to know the comma s cousins. Luckily you only really need to focus on a few main rules in order to do well on the act. The remaining statements exemplify the use of a comma coupled with a coordinating conjunction to properly shift to the next point and indicate how the two clauses are related.

Here s an overview of how they re used with examples. Note the following examples. And the reason is because the act will often put another word after a comma that is not one of these fanboys and that would. The oxford comma serves a key purpose here as florence and the machine is one musical act. That s a pretty broad goal and there are a lot of different uses for commas.

Class because she was able to learn. Class because she was able to learn c. Use two dashes or two commas. They re used for separate reasons. Colons semicolons and dashes.