Intern’s Corner: Grammar Refresher and Essentials Tutorial: Commas

I am taking an ethics in communication class this term, and one of the suggestions our instructor has is for us to go onto the OWL and take some grammar refresher courses. Therefore, I thought it would be fitting to end my last few weeks of this internship working on those refresher courses and telling you about them.

Commas

This blog post will focus on Commas. The comma tutorial provided by the

Excelsior Online Writing Lab has a slide show of 40 slides, where the last10 are quiz questions. The title of this module is called The Comma: Tricky, Mysterious, and Subjective? As you go through the tutorial you will notice that the OWL states comas are not tricky; we just need to understand the rules and realize they are not subjective.

The OWL tutorial also explains most students were told to place a comma every time they would catch a breath as if they were speaking. However, this advice is incorrect. The OWL provides guidelines as to when and when not to use commas to understand better how to use commas correctly.

Here is an infographic I made utilizing the comma tutorial with some of the guidelines the OWL has provided. If you want even more helpful tips, the OWL also provides a Grammar Essentials tutorial.

Ginger Hamblin is an intern for the Excelsior University Online Writing Lab. She has been a student of Excelsior University for almost two years and is pursuing her Bachelor of Science – Liberal Arts in Professional and Technical Writing. She is a writing enthusiast, painter, wife, and mother of three boys.