Grammar and Punctuation in 3 Minutes

Transcript

Here is a secret about grammar: most of the mistakes teachers circle on your papers come from just four rules. Master those four, and your writing instantly gets cleaner. Let's walk through them in three minutes.

First, commas. Use a comma after an introductory phrase, like this: "After the bell rang, the students lined up." Say it out loud and you can hear the pause — that pause is where the comma goes. Commas also separate items in a list: "I packed a sandwich, an apple, and a water bottle." What commas cannot do is glue two complete sentences together by themselves. "I finished my homework, I went outside" is called a comma splice. Fix it with a period, a semicolon, or a joining word: "I finished my homework, so I went outside."

Second, apostrophes. An apostrophe means one of two things: something is owned, or letters are missing. "The dog's bone" — the bone belongs to the dog. "It's raining" — the apostrophe replaces the missing letter in "it is." Here is the tricky part: the possessive of "it" has no apostrophe at all. "The dog wagged its tail" is correct. If you can replace the word with "it is" and the sentence still makes sense, use the apostrophe. If not, leave it out.

Third, subject-verb agreement. The verb has to match the true subject of the sentence, and the true subject is not always the noun sitting closest to the verb. Take "The list of items is on the table." The subject is "list," not "items," so the verb is "is," not "are." When you're unsure, cross out the prepositional phrase in your head and match the verb to what's left.

Fourth, run-on sentences. A run-on jams two complete thoughts together with no punctuation: "I finished my homework I went outside." Your reader has no signal where one idea ends and the next begins. Break it into two sentences, or connect the thoughts with a comma plus a word like "and," "but," or "so."

One common mistake before we finish: words like "everyone" and "each" feel plural, but they take a singular verb. "Everyone is here" is correct — not "everyone are here."

So here's your recap. Commas mark pauses and lists but can't join two sentences alone, and apostrophes show ownership or missing letters — except in "its." Match your verb to the true subject, and never let two complete thoughts run together without punctuation.