Ordinarily, I would say that I am quite good in my grasp of English language, but I have an Achilles heel, in that I am rubbish with commas! I don’t know what it is, but for some reason I cannot get them right. I have identified it previously in my OLA as a weakness, but I have never made much of an effort to tackle the problem, until now that is!

I took to the internet and found a video on Youtube:

The video goes through the 3 main types of comma: listing commas, joining commas and bracketing commas. It explained what each is and how and when to use them.

Around 4 1/2 minutes in, you are asked to look at 4 sentences and pick the ones with incorrect use of commas. I originally thought there was a trick, as all looked correct to me. I think my problem is with the joining comma. I find that I use commas too often, and in place of other punctuation, such as full stops and semi-colons which would be more grammatically correct.

I also looked up a video about the Oxford comma. Which is a comma which comes after the word ‘and’.

The Oxford comma was something I had heard of, but not ever learned to use. The video explains that it is neither correct or incorrect and can avoid ambiguity. The problem is that a text will be consistent, either using it or not using it. I wonder if I have been using it when the OLA will not recognise it and mark it as wrong.

I looked through one of my essays to find an example of my own use of commas:

‘On placement I observed a classroom which utilised space effectively in this way, all small resources – pens, crayons and show-me boards – were kept in labelled trays at the front, meaning pupils knew exactly where to find them and where to return them, so the gathering of resources was kept to a minimum and did not affect learning and teaching time.’

This is all one sentence, and it is clear that it could be broken down and does not need anywhere  near as many commas as I have used. This is a good example of what I do regularly and therefore what I need to teach myself out of. I am going to resit the OLA and try to improve the points I get specifically around the comma questions. I’ll update when I have done so…