We’ve had so many questions regarding grammar that we’ve brought the topic back for another go around. This year we will begin with some of the rules that are pretty much set in stone. Later, we may come back to touch on some rules that are still in flux, but first we need to warn you about rules that aren’t really rules.
Don’t Follow the “Rules”
Before we get started going over some of the good rules, we want to discuss a few “rules” that you may have been taught in school but don’t really need to follow. The reason we still have those rules seems to be one of “teach what you’ve been taught”. You’ll even find that the folks who provide the software that you use to write your book have been following those useless rules, often suggesting that you change perfectly valid sentences into something that sounds vague, stiff, or inappropriate.
The whole difficulty started way back in the Victorian times when those teaching and codifying English thought that Latin was the be all and end all of languages. They did their best to transfer some rules from Latin into English. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), English isn’t Latin, so those “borrowed” rules just didn’t fit.
The sad thing is that for the past 200 years or so, English has been taught with those rules as if they were useful—they aren’t, and they just get in the way of effective communication. After all, isn’t that what languages are used for? If they don’t communicate the proper message, then they aren’t worth the time to learn.
We’ve mentioned a few of those “rules” over the past few years: Split Infinitives, Prepositions at the ends of sentences, Singular They, and we even touched on the use of punctuation around quotes. If you come across any other rules that don’t seem right, please let us know, so we can research, analyse, and report back.
When to Use a Comma with Dependent Clauses
Dependent clauses are wonderful things. They help us connect ideas to show relationships. In the examples below, we have two sentences that are both true individually, but they work better when the connection between the ideas is expressed. That is done by using a Subordinating Conjunction, making one clause dependent on the other.
- Don arrives. I will jump.
- When Don arrives, I will jump.
- I will jump when Don arrives.
- Fred trips. Fred will fall
- If Fred trips, he will fall.
- Fred will fall if he trips.
- It will be warm. The sun shines.
- It will be warm because the sun shines.
- Because the sun shines, it will be warm.
- You go. I will follow.
- Wherever you go, I will follow.
- I will follow wherever you go.
You’ll notice that the clauses can be put in either order…depending on your focus. You typically want the more important idea to be the last part the reader encounters. The key here is that when the clause with the subordinating conjunction comes first, we need a comma to show where that clause ends, so the next one can begin. If the clause with the conjunction comes last, then the conjunction acts as the separator between them. In class, you’ll often see the rule written on the board like this:
DC,IC or ICDC
Dependent clause first, use a comma.
Independent clause first, no comma.
Remember that, and you’ll be well on your way.