College Writing Clinic

The focus is on sentences.

Commas: when to use them and where to put them

I find commas all over the place in my students’ work. Only rarely do they appear where they should.

Introduce the concept

Project this:

What’s wrong with these sentences?

From the cover of a magazine:

  • “Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.”

A sign on a store bathroom:

  • “Attention—Toilet Only for Disabled Elderly Pregnant Children”

A Facebook post:

  • “We have 2 hours to kill someone come see us.”

A fashion tip for the party:

  • “Don’t wear black people.”

Animal rights poster:

  • “Stop Clubbing, Baby Seals”

Mom calls the kids to dinner via Facebook:

  • “Time to eat children.”

Ask the class if they can see where the problem lies.

Then explain. This is one of the most common problems among student writers: leaving out commas that are needed, and putting commas in the wrong places. It’s a problem they can fix, starting today—and learning to use commas correctly will make a big difference in the impression their work makes.

The lesson

I break the class into small groups, and assign each group one of the following sentences. Their task: to deduce a rule about where to place commas, based on the model.

Here are the sentences I project on the screen:

What are the rules for using commas? Deduce at least one rule for your sentence. (Find the comma, and see how it’s being used.)

  1. Before he joined the Army, Melvin was a slob.
  2. I’ll have the bacon, spumoni, and eggplant.
  3. She said, “I love you.”
  4. “But I’m a vampire,” he replied.
  5. You paddled your canoe to Nebraska, and I bicycled to Hawaii.
  6. The alien dog, which had green fur, wagged its tails.
  7. Shakespeare’s most famous play, The Empire Strikes Back, was written in 1980.

(If I didn’t amuse myself when writing lesson plans, I’d go crazy.)

Each group then reports in, explaining the rule they came up with. If they’re stumped, or wrong, I help them.

When we’re done, I project this master list of rules.

Here are the rules for placing commas:

  1. After an introductory phrase
  • Before he joined the Army, Melvin was a slob.
  1. In lists of three or more items, use a comma after each item except the last.
  • I’ll have the bacon, spumoni, and eggplant.
  1. When introducing a quotation, place the commas as shown.
  • She said, “I love you.”
  1. When the speaker is identified after the quotation, follow this model:
  • “But I’m a vampire,” he replied.
  1. In a compound sentence (two independent clauses joined by a conjunction), place a comma before the conjunction.
  • You paddled your canoe to Nebraska, and I bicycled to Hawaii.
  1. When a word or phrase follows a noun and modifies it, if it’s not absolutely necessary to the meaning of the sentence, put commas around it.
  • The alien dog, which had green fur, wagged its tails.
    • NOTE: If you need the phrase to clarify which dog you mean, then don’t use commas: The dog that bit me must be re-trained!
  1. When using an appositive (a noun or noun phrase that gives more specific information about the noun just before it), put commas around it.
  • Shakespeare’s most famous play, The Empire Strikes Back, was written in 1980.
    • [Not true, by the way. I knew that.]

Now it’s time for students to try this for themselves.

This can be done as a quiz, if you want to see how well they understand the rules, or as a group exercise, if you’re confident that most of your students can do this. A third option: if you copy the following sentences into a Padlet window, each student can copy the list into a new window and place commas as needed. Then you can see which students, if any, need more instruction.

Copy these sentences to a new window, and place commas where they’re needed

  1. Oil which is lighter than water rises to the surface.
  2. The closet contained worn clothes old shoes and dirty hats.
  3. After surviving this ordeal the dentist felt relieved.
  4. He replied “I have no idea where to put the comma.”
  5. Vests which were once popular have been out of fashion for several years.
  6. Bob like many students got advice from different sources.

Homework

If many of your students still seem to have a shaky understanding of where to place commas, have the class complete this interactive quiz, which provides an explanation for each answer:

http://www.chompchomp.com/hotpotatoes/commas01.htm

If only a few students seem not to understand, you may want to assign the quiz only to those students.

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