Comma Practice

Comma Practice

Separating Items in a Series

  1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest make up a popular series of novels.
  2. Which of the following tittles was published first: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the deathly Hollows, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix?
  3. Long complicated, and engrossing are three word novels that some readers say describe the Harry Potter novels.
  4. Paula Fox’s novel, The Slave Dancer, conveys the horrors of capturing transporting and selling Africans to become slaves. 
  5. Correct
  6. J.R.R. Tolkien earned a graduate degree in the study of languages, worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, and became a professor at Oxford University before he wrote The Hobbit. 
  7. After The Hobbit, Tolkien created the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made up of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. 
  8. Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry and Finn shows the best and worst qualities of American society, explores Huck’s moral struggle over helping Jim to escape, and introduced Americans to a new way of writing. 
  9. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, won a Pulitzer Prize and an American book award, and was made into a film. 
  10. The first trilogy by Jane Yolen, consist of Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, and A Sending of Dragons. 

One thought on “Comma Practice”

  1. Hi, Christine,
    Nice work getting started on your practice! In MLA, items in a series use the Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma). That means that all listed items are followed by a comma except for the last item (as you applied in your first two examples).

    We will talk more about the use of commas around essential or non-essential information, but your use of the serial comma in the above examples is correct with exception of one missed comma in #3: “Long, complicated, and engrossing…” Note the comma between the first two descriptive words as they are independent of one another.

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