Tag: english

I’ve shown my previous post to my English teacher, who spent almost 40 minutes of a lesson editing the text. There are a lot of mistakes made by me there but most of them can be avoided by practice, more reading, and improving my vocabulary. But two types of errors are interesting since I didn’t know about them till now. They are both related to the conjunction “and”.

Most puzzling was that I shouldn’t put a comma before the conjunction “and” in a compound sentence. Spellcheckers are putting coma there and most found English rules suggest that the comma is needed there. Nevertheless, I’ve been learning American English. It’s the most common in the world and more accessible with the most entertaining media in it. However, American English is trying to eliminate unnecessary commas and I shouldn’t put them in a compound sentence if it’s clear that “and” connects different parts of it.

Here is an article about that: http://grammartips.homestead.com/compoundsentences.html It’s over 20 years old, so now, commas are used even less often than described. Furthermore, examples from it are considered wrong by spellcheckers. I’m using Grammarly for that and suggest you use it too. It’s an Ukranian product and especially needs support now.