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07
Lesson 07 · Standard English Conventions

Unnecessary Punctuation

In this lesson, you will learn to

  • Identify unnecessary punctuation in key sentence structures
  • Eliminate unnecessary commas between subjects and verbs, verbs and objects, and verbs and prepositions
  • Recognize and eliminate unnecessary punctuation between a preposition and its complement
  • Identify and eliminate unnecessary punctuation within coordinates
Overview

In Lesson 5: Interruptions and Lesson 6: Opening and Closing Supplements, you learned how to punctuate key sentence elements. However, there are many instances in which punctuation is not required. Some textbooks refer to this situation as "extra punctuation", but we'll call it "unnecessary punctuation". In this lesson, we'll look at some common patterns in unnecessary punctuation questions, including unnecessary punctuation between a subject and its verb, a verb and its object, and punctuation around prepositions.

Unnecessary Punctuation Between a Subject and Its Verb

In Lesson 4: Finite and Nonfinite Verbs, you learned to identify subject-verb pairs, and in Lesson 5: Interruptions, you learned about a common pattern that involves an interruption between a subject and its verb.

🔎For example:

Neuroplasticity, the brain's innate capacity to adapt, diminishes with age. ✅

In other words, you know that there can be parallel punctuation between a subject and its verb—e.g., a pair of commas, dashes, or parentheses.

💡 TipHowever—and this is very important—there can almost never be a single piece of punctuation between a subject and its verb.

That is, there can almost never be a single comma, a single dash, or a single parenthesis between a subject and its verb.

For that matter, there can never be a period, question mark, exclamation point, semicolon, or colon between a subject and its verb.

🔎For example:

❌ Neuroplasticity, diminishes with age.

❌ Neuroplasticity—diminishes with age.

❌ Neuroplasticity; diminishes with age.

✅ Neuroplasticity diminishes with age.

The first three examples above are wrong because they place a single piece of punctuation between the subject ("Neuroplasticity") and the verb ("diminishes"). The fourth example sentence is correct since it does not place any punctuation between the subject and the verb.

📝 NoteThe one exception is when a verb is part of a relative clause. For example: "James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which was published in the early 20th century, remains a seminal work of modernist literature." In this case, "was" is a verb corresponding to Ulysses, but it is separated from Ulysses with a comma. For more on relative clauses see Lesson 11: Verb Form in Clauses and Coordinates.
🔎Let's look at a longer example:

❌ The genome of an 11,500-year-old infant girl, found in Alaska has revealed new insights into human migration to North America.

❌ The genome of an 11,500-year-old infant girl found in Alaska—has revealed new insights into human migration to North America.
🔒

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The rest of this lesson is open to students with an access code.

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8. Essential and Nonessential Elements
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