Page 95 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

SENTENCES, PHRASES, AND TEXT CONSTRUCTION 81
1. Comma Plus Coordinating Conjunction
Sentence #1 , and Sentence #2 , or
, yet , but
Washington is the nation's top cherry producer, and farmers in the state grew a re- cord 85,000 tons of cherries last summer.
Sentence #1 , Sentence #2 , and Sentence #3 , or
, but , yet
People like to eat sweet cherries2 bakers put them in their pies, and jam-makers cannot get enough of them.
In formal academic text in general, according to Quirk et al. (1985), com- pound sentences may be of limited value, and most are found in informal prose. These authors also noted that formal written discourse highly prefers
3
the use of comma in compound sentences joined by conjunctions.
The use of commas without conjunctions results in one of the most fre- quent sentence-boundary errors found in L2 writing, usually referred to as
run-on sentences (or comma splices).
*The new advances in technology in the 20th century are amazing, we now have the World Wide Web to connect people for communication, scientists have invented newAIDS drugs.
Run-ons of this type are relatively easy to fix by simply inserting a coordi- nating conjunction at the sentence boundary after the comma: The con-
junction is necessary to add power to the separate the sentences.
3
The punctuationrules for compound sentences do not apply to compound noun and verb
phrases (see chap.11).
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