Through years of experience marking tasks written in English by non-native English speakers, I can see that punctuation is one feature of language acquisition that is ignored. Most students simple transfer their knowledge of punctuation from their native language and apply these same principles to English. Well, sometimes that works, but not always—especially when we go beyond the full stop and question mark.
Without getting into the nitty-gritty of all the ins and outs of the comma, I thought I might just focus on one recurring error with comma use called the comma splice. To understand the comma splice you have to have a good grip on English grammatical rules including those regarding sentence structure and its internal features. Now, my hope is that I have captivated this in the picture above.
Is there a punctuation mark you'd like to learn more about?
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