Essay Writing and Advanced Punctuation in English

Providing additional information with two commas

Again, having supported my thesis, I am now going to draw a conclusion.

As long as competitive markets with profit maximization, distribution optimization, and laws of supply and demand rule the production of meat, animals will be suffering above a ”baseline of pain”. It remains highly questionable whether eating meat can be seen as ‘nice’ under such circumstances as the ones described above.

After my conclusion, I signal, as usual, transition to the next paragraph.

Having shown that producing and eating meat, as presently being done, should not be attributed with the four N’s, I will now go on to discuss the question of inferiority of animals.

In the two sentences above, the one I said and the one I wrote, I have used a comma bracket (two commas) to mark off some additional information I have put into a sentence. Such parenthetical (bracketed) information is not necessary for the sentence to be complete, i.e. it is non-restricting, which makes commas necessary. I use such additional information as a stylistic means. I can add information like an important sudden inspiration.
 

After my conclusion, I signal, as usual, transition to the next paragraph.

Having shown that producing and eating meat, the way it is presently being done, should not be attributed with any of the four n’s, I will now go on to discuss the question of inferiority of animals.

Non-restriction is an important concept. It means that the words in the non-restricting phrase are not necessary for the meaning of the main clause. It can be taken out without disturbing the main clause. I like using the following grammatical structures:
1 Appositions (additional information in form of a noun or noun phrase)
2 Non-restricting relative clause
3 Non-restricting relative clause
4 Comment
5 Stance adverbial

1 Bernhard Grzimek was most famous for the work he undertook for the conservation of the Serengeti, a large national park in Tanzania.

2 During World War II, Grzimek, who repeatedly supplied food to hidden Jews in Berlin, was a veterinarian and worked for the Food Ministry of the 3rd Empire.

3 Bernhard Grzimek, who was a zoo director and zoologist, worked as book author, editor and animal conservationist in Germany. Grzimek fled from Berlin to Frankfurt, which was occupied by the U.S. Army at the time.

4 In April 1945 he was appointed police chief of Frankfurt by U.S. authorities, clearly a sign of confidence.

5 Grzimek, of course, refused the job.

A simple test we can make to find out whether our commas are fine goes like this: Remove the words between the bracketing commas. Is the sentence structure still all right, your bracketing commas are correct.

Another point is that producing meat requires a lot of feed, from 3.3 to 25kg for 1kg of meat (Alexander 2016), and often leads to conversion of cropland into grazing land.

Another point is that producing meat requires a lot of feed and often leads to conversion of cropland into grazing land.



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