Use a comma to separate two independent clauses when they are joined by one of seven coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). We were out of ice cream, so I went to the store. (c) ...

A student in my “History of the English Language” course stopped me after class a few weeks ago and asked, “I was just wondering—how do you feel about the Oxford comma?” She could have asked about the ...

Liz in Newport Beach, Calif., posed a good question about commas. Consider the following two sentences. "Days are usually great, but, when they aren't great, they still pass in 24 hours." "Every word ...

In school, I was taught about conjunctions (e.g. or and and) and the role they play in sentence structure – they are linking words. They do what they say on the tin: con-(i.e. with) and -junction (i.e ...

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare. It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, ...