Insert commas in the following sentences to prevent misreading.

1. Though happy people still have moments of self-doubt.

2. In research subjects have reported themselves to be generally happy people.

3. Yet those who have described sufferings as well as joys.

4. Of fifty eight subjects reported bouts of serious depression.

5. For half the preceding year had included at least one personal crisis.

FINAL TESTS ON COMMA

(recommended for third-year students and fourth-year students)

TEST A

If I had known that it was going to be such hard work I might not have taken the junior course in creative writing. Mrs. Gladstone who was teaching the course that year was the teacher I had had in sophomore English and I thought I could gain a lot from taking her course. Because the stories in our literature anthology seemed so short simple and easy to read I had thought it would be a breeze. Well after a few weeks of assignments I realized that there was a lot more to writing a story than putting words down on paper.

At first I decided to write a football story but then I realized that I really didn’t know enough about football never having played the game. After discarding polo and ice hockey for the same reason I got an inspiration. I would write a story about the War Between the States for we had been studying it in history.

When I tried to imagine how a young Confederate soldier would feel about having to fight in the Battle of Gettysburg I was at a loss. My difficulty was that I had never been in the South and had never been a soldier I was a young peaceable high school girl living in a quiet country town in New England.

When I was ready to give up I remembered that the best way to write is to choose a subject that you know have experienced or have discovered for yourself.

TEST B

1. I think George would be surprised to learn that rules are not as a matter of fact made to be broken.

2. Mr. Grant’s office the one at the end of the hall contains most if not all the books you will need.

3. Some Eugene O’Neill’s early plays moody one-act dramas of the sea established his reputation with at least one important group the critics.

4. Now ladies and gentlemen of the jury the time has come to consider the facts and to reach a just decision.

5. Some novels such as Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage are more than just the adventure stories they appear to be on the surface.

6. Mark Twain was not merely a clown and entertainer but a great novelist perhaps the greatest of its time and place.

7. Mr. Phillips the principal of our school has one outstanding characteristic he always tries I think to be fair to the students.

8. Why may I ask did you promise to keep the secret when as a matter of fact you knew you were not going to do so.

TEST C

1. When Dr Hayden the county medical officer arrived at the scene of the wreck he ordered the area cleared set up an emergency-aid station and at once began to treat the injured.

2. First performed on October 30 1944 in Washington DC Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring which is still a “young” work has been performed by almost every important orchestra of America and Europe.

3. Although the tennis court looked ragged Mike’s father settling back observed that it wouldn’t take us more than a few hours to have it looking clean smooth and brand-new.

4. Well driving on this road we cannot possibly get to Rutland Vermont for the map shows that we are following a route which will take us westward to Whitehall New York.

5. On my walk through the streets of my old neighborhood I was astonished to find apartment houses theatres and supermarkets in places where I remembered empty lots or woods or tiny one- family houses.

6. A man’s house may be his castle but why does the castle have to be above ground when an underground house has so many advantages

7. Protected from wind rain and cold an underground house will have low fuel bills.

8. The owner will not have to pay for exterior painting which is necessary every few years on a surface house.

9. On a fine Saturday morning in early spring your mother won’t ask you to stay home mow the lawn wash the windows etc. for there will be no windows or lawn.

10. If the President of this country ever decides that people have to move underground to save space I’ll be the first to go.

TEST D

In the following passage from Peter M. Lincoln’s “Documentary Wallpapers”, we have deliberately introduced some errors in punctuation. Remove all misused commas, add any that are needed, and leave any that are correctly used.

Many early American homes were decorated with block-printed wallpapers. Imported from England, and France, the papers made the arrival of ships from abroad an exciting event for Colonial homemakers. Merchants, looking for sales, advertised that papering was cheaper than whitewashing, and, they urged would-be customers to examine the endless variety of brightly coloured patterns. Indeed by today’s standard the colours in many Colonial papers seem vibrant, intense, and, even gaudy. One wonders whether the citizens of Boston Massachusetts and Providence Rhode Island, yearned for bright reds, greens, and blues because of the grey, New England winters.

The process of reproducing historic wallpapers requires the finesse of a craftsman. To establish a particular paper's full pattern, the expert may have to fit together the fragments of surviving samples, that he finds in museums in the attics of old houses and even under layers of other papers. He determines the original hue of the colours in various ways: he runs chemical tests, or, he matches a fragment to a fresh original in some museum, even then he must be careful before proceeding to the next step printing the design. As a final precaution therefore he makes, a blacklight examination knowing it may reveal otherwise indistinguishable elements of the pattern.

One of the leading experts in America is Dorothy Waterhouse cofounder of Waterhouse Hangings. She first became interested in historic wallpapers in 1932 when she was restoring, an old house on Cape Cod Massachusetts. While stripping the walls in one room she got down to the eighth, and bottom layer of paper. She became very excited, she knew it had to be over 140 years old. That discovery was the first of many. Today she has a collection of some three hundred historic wallpapers, all carefully stored in her Boston home.

The Semicolon

The semicolon has often been described as either a weak period or a strong comma; in other words, it is part period and part comma. The most common use of the semicolon is to indicate a close relationship between two independent clauses.