Essay Writing and Advanced Punctuation in English
Listing and emphasizing with commas
The most interesting essays are usually about topics about which there is a controversy. There seems to be hardly anything that human beings like more than discussing things controversially. That means for our essay, of course, that we will have to point out such a controversy to our reader to show them that we are discussing a really hot topic.
There are also studies that challenge this concept of superiority and demonstrate that animals can feel, learn and look forward to pleasant consequences of their actions.
In these sentences, I used commas to list three things – here, for example, three verbs. It can also be used to list nouns or phrases. If you list nouns or phrases that contain commas you need semi-colons.
Animals can feel, learn and look forward to pleasant consequences of their actions.
I came, saw and conquered.
The three nephews of Donald Duck were called Huey, Dewey and Louie.
You can have a veggie burger with mustard, with ketchup or with fiery ketchup.
You can have a veggie burger with mustard, ketchup or fiery ketchup; a veggie sandwich with gouda, cheddar or Vegemite; or a veggie roll with German, Mexican or Japanese vegetable.
In the same way, we can list three sentences, but note that we can not list two sentences in this way. For this we would need a coordinating conjunction. This is a word that joins two elements of equal grammatical rank and syntactic importance. That means they can join two verbs, two nouns, two adjectives, two phrases or two independent clauses. The seven coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so (or aka FANBOYS). We will talk about this later.
Prof. Smith comes from Birmingham, Prof. Harris comes from Edinburgh and Prof. Torres comes from Madrid.