Using commas

Exercise 1. Commas and Introductory Material

1. When the lecture was over, everyone started packing up to go home. Most
people put their books in their bags and left the room. However, Maria
wanted to talk to the instructor, so she went up to the front of the room.
The instructor was busy sorting out his lecture notes. After he had put them
in his briefcase, she spoke to him. Unfortunately, he was in a big hurry. He
asked her to see him during his office hours the next day. Frustrated by this,
Maria left the room.
2. Jumping up and down, the children waited for the movie to begin. Because
they had heard so much about the movie, they weren’t surprised when it
began with a cartoon.
3. During the coffee break, Peter ran down to the library to renew his library
books. Surprised, he found the library was closed. He had forgotten that the
library was on reduced summer hours. As a result of the early summer
closures, he had to renew his books the next day.
Exercise 2. Commas in Lists
1. Her favorite science fiction authors are Terry Brooks, Ray Bradbury and
Marian Zimmer Bradley.
2. She served her guests coffee and cake.
3. At the store, she bought milk, orange, juice, pasta and tea.
4. The instructor showed a video, explained some key concepts and led a class
discussion.
5. Basketball, hockey, football, baseball and soccer are popular spectator
sports.
6. She played the piano and sang in the school choir.
7. He is taking history, psychology, political science and economics this term.
Exercise 3. Commas and Coordinators
1. The Alouette satellite was launched in 1962, and the Anik satellite was
launched in 1972.
2. The two satellites were used for communication and were launched with
American rockets.
 3. The satellites were Canadian, but the Americans launched them.
4. Julie Payette is a woman scientist, so she is a role model for Canadian girls.
5. Girls are good at science in elementary school, but often they lose interest
in science in high school.
6. Girls tend to do as well as boys in science courses, yet they often think it is
for boys.
7. Julie Payette studied engineering and joined Canada`s space program.
Exercise 4. Commas with Interrupters
1. Rina`s father, a bus driver, does shift work.
2. An elephant that is raised in a zoo cannot survive in the wild.
3. The fall of the Berlin Wall, according to many political analysts, marked the
end of the cold war.
4. The Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin, was a symbol of the
relationship between the western and the Soviet block countries.
5. The process of pasteurization, which was invented by Louis Pasteur, has
saved millions of lives.
6. Louis Pasteur, a French scientist, invented the process of pasteurization.
7. Pasteur, by the age of 26, was famous for his work with crystals.
8. Later, he studied bacteriology, a new field in chemistry.
9. He showed that bacteria, otherwise known as germs, can be killed by
applying controlled heat.
10.The use of heat as a means to kill germs became known as pasteurization.
Exercise 5. Commas and Quotations
1. Ken asked, “When`s the paper due?”
2. “I don`t know, but I hope it`s not soon”, responded Cathy, “because I`, still
looking for my information.”
3. The instructor told them that the paper was due next Tuesday.
4. Cathy later told ken that she was “in big trouble” because she was still
looking for her information.
5. “Don`t worry”, replied Ken. “I`m sure you`ll get it finished if you work
hard.”
6. Cathy complained, “But it`s my sister`s birthday on the weekend, and I
wanted to have some fun.”
 7. “School can really interfere with your social life”, joked Ken.
8. That night, Cathy asked her sister if they could get together for a special
dinner on Tuesday instead of on Saturday.
Exercise 6. Commas with Time, Number and Place
1. We leave from the Vancouver airport at 7:15 a.m., April 15.
2. We arrive in Halifax, Nova Scotia at about 6 o`clock that afternoon.
3. In Halifax, we will be staying at Rachel`s place.
4. Actually, she lives at 655 Brown St., Dartmouth, N.S., which is just across
the bay from Halifax.
5. I met Rachel in June, 1998 at a conference in London, England.
6. Halifax had a huge fire which destroyed most of the downtown area on
December 6, 1917.
7. Over 1,600 people were killed in the blaze.
8. The day after we arrive, Rachel will drive us to Truro, Nova Scotia where we
can get on the ferry for Prince Edward Island.
Exercise 7. Finding Commas in the Real World
1. A comma that separates an introductory part of a sentence from the main
sentence.
Until this week, Musk had not sold any shares of company's stock since
2016.
(https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/13/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-
sale/index.html )

2. Commas that separate items in a list.

But he also owns estates in the Hamptons in New York, as well as in
London, Bermuda, Colorado and Florida.
(https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/where-do-the-richest-
americans-live-41982?reflink=outbrain_editorial-
int_00166e7c5b08741bd45ea324ddf87b45ca&dicbo=v1-
43925d23f84e65365dc689fd8bc2d49c-
00f0464d4134b070538283435e8e7fd395-
mjstinrzha4tqljxgfqweljuguzwmllbga3toljqha4wcmbsmy3wknzwgu )
3. A comma used with a coordinator to separate two complete thoughts.
The value of the shares at that time will be treated as normal income, and
he'll have to pay a 40.8% federal tax rate.
(https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/13/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-
sale/index.html )

4. Commas that separate words that interrupt the flow of a sentence.

But other board members and top executives have been selling stock all
along, including his brother Kimbal Musk, a Tesla board member.
(https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/13/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-
sale/index.html )

5. Commas that separate a direct quotation from the rest of a sentence.

Future residents will be able to grab “kayaks and paddle boards from the
built-in racks and cruise around the inlets and canals,” she said, or “hit a
bucket of biodegradable balls into the Bay from custom made golf
platforms.”
(https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/waterfront-california-home-of-
the-late-robin-williams-lists-for-7-25-million-209558?
reflink=outbrain_celebrity-
int_005167681620d8aa0dcc3f8445930959a6&dicbo=v1-
416608bb2ff5f1bd48d9426e88848454-
00f0464d4134b070538283435e8e7fd395-
mjstinrzha4tqljxgfqweljuguzwmllbga3toljqha4wcmbsmy3wknzwgu )

6. Commas that separate components of dates, numbers or addresses.

The Federal Reserve's most recent estimate puts the median household net
worth at $121,700.
(https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/13/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-
sale/index.html )

Mr. James, 35, bought the longtime home of the late daytime drama
creator Lee Phillip Bell.
(https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/nba-star-lebron-james-scores-
36-75-million-beverly-hills-mansion-219943?reflink=outbrain_apartment-
 int_00166e7c5b08741bd45ea324ddf87b45ca&dicbo=v1-
ea656025a1effaa1e49d09a093bdadc7-
00f0464d4134b070538283435e8e7fd395-
mjstinrzha4tqljxgfqweljuguzwmllbga3toljqha4wcmbsmy3wknzwgu )

Exercise 8. Using the Six Comma Rules

1. David told me that he was born in Seoul, Korea on April 15, 1979.
2. When he was 6 years old, his family moved to Trail, British Columbia, a
small town in south central B.C.
3. The population of Trail at that time was only about 10,000.
4. His father worked in the smelter there, and his mother ran a sewing
business.
5. David learned English quickly at school, but his mother didn’t learn much
English for a long time, because she didn’t get much chance to practice.
6. David had a quiet childhood and saw little of Canada.
7. He had, in fact, never even visited Vancouver until he came here to a
basketball competition, when he was in Grade 11.
8. Just before starting Grade 12, he met Henry Thompson, who had recently
moved to Trail to work at Selkirk College.
9. This ex-biology student from U.B.C. passionately interested in
environmental issues, inspired David with his talk of urban ecology.
10.David had always thought of ecology as something that only existed in the
wilderness, so Henry’s talk of urban ecology was something new.
11.David began to think he might attend U.B.C. Simon Fraser or the University
of Victoria to study biology, when he finished high school.
12.In grade 12, Henry had to do a biology project on an environmental issue,
and he chose to focus on urban ecology.
13.He wrote about birds and mammals in the Vancouver area.
14.While doing his research, he read about Douglas College’s Institute of
Urban Ecology, which he had never heard of before.
15.David sent for information about the program and told Henry, “That’s the
program for me.”
 16.On Wednesday, July 17, 1998, David received notification that he had been
accepted into the program.
17.Coincidentally, David started life in a huge city, grew up in a small town and
eventually moved to a city again.
18.Furthermore, he plans to spend his life studying cities.
Exercise 9. Editing a Paragraph for Commas
Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor, became a famous Canadian who is better
known outside of Canada than in it. Bethune was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario in
1890. As a young man, he studied medicine, and in 1917, he became a doctor. At
the age of 36, he was stricken with tuberculosis, a devastating lung disease. He
spent about a year recovering. Subsequently, he won worldwide fame for his
experiments in lung surgery and for his invention of instruments used in chest
surgery. In 1936, Bethune joined the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War.
When he developed the first mobile blood transfusion service in history, his fame
around the world increased. The blood transfusion service allowed doctors for the
first time to provide significant treatment to soldiers near battle fronts. In 1938,
Bethune went to China, which was at war with Japan. Bethune organized field
hospitals served as a battle surgeon and set up medical schools to train Chinese
surgeons. In November, 1938, he became medical chief of the Chinese Eighth
Route Army. Unfortunately, in 1939, after only 21 months in China, Bethune died
of blood poisoning. Despite Bethune’s major medical innovations, most Canadians
have never heard of him. However, he is considered a national hero in China and
is well known in many other parts of the world.
Exercise 10. Proofreading your own Writing for Commas Errors
Elon Reeve Musk FRS is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the
founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX. Musk is the wealthiest person in the
world as of November, 2021 with a net worth of around US$271.5 billion. Musk
was born to a Canadian mother and a South African father and raised in Pretoria,
South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to
Canada at age 17 to attend Queen's University. He transferred to the University of
Pennsylvania two years later, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics
and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but
decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software
company Zip2 with brother Kimbal.
Compaq acquired the startup for US$307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk
co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form
PayPal. EBay bought the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In 2002, Musk founded
SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer, and space transport services company, of
which he is CEO and CTO. In 2004, he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla
Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its
CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company
later acquired by Tesla, and became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI,
a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. In
2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on
developing brain-computer interfaces, and founded The Boring Company, a
tunnel construction company. Musk has proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed
vactrain transportation system.