- Macarena could feel the ocean breeze against her face,soshe preferred to
stay outside. - Fritz asked Macarena to go to Catalina,andFred asked her to go to San Fran-
cisco.
Usage NoteCoordinating conjunctions frequently confuse writers when it comes to
punctuation. For example, when a coordinating conjunction joins two clauses,
as in sentences 59 through 61, many student writers leave out the comma that
comes before the conjunction. It is important to understand that punctuation is
a matter of convention, which means that people generally have agreed that it
should be done a certain way. In this case, the convention maintains that writers
need that comma. Without it, the sentence is called a run-on.
Equally problematic, however, is a tendency of many writers, even professional
ones, to use a comma to separate two phrases—especially verb phrases—that have
been joined with a coordinating conjunction. This tendency manifests itself when-
ever the conjoined phrases start to get long. Consider this sentence:
- ?The governor asked the legislature to reconsider the bill that had failed dur-
ing the previous session,andconvened a special task force to evaluate its
ramifications if passed.
This sentence has a compound verb phrase in the predicate. If we reduce it to
its basic structure, with the verbs in italics, the sentence reads:
62a. The governoraskedthe legislature [something] andconveneda special task
force.Clearly, a comma between the two verbs is inappropriate. In fact, the comma
in sentence 62 is the equivalent of sentence 63, which even inexperienced writ-
ers do not produce:
- ?The cat jumped, and played.
The motivation to put a comma in sentences like sentence 62 may be based
on an unconscious fear that the long, compound predicate will be hard to pro-
cess, but this fear is unfounded. Moreover, separating the two parts of the predi-
cate with the comma is bound to make some readers think negatively about the
writer because it is such an obvious violation of existing conventions.
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR 85