I get asked a lot of questions about commas often my students will say this looks like a lot of commas in this sentence can that possibly be right with all those commas and the answer is it depends as long as each of those commas is following a comma rule then you're good to go there's a few ways to use commas on the ACT English section so let's break it down the first way to use commas would be to make lists this one's kind of obvious so I won't spend a whole lot of time on it but an example of this would be I would describe Bethany as sweet comma silly comma and sensitive easy enough the second way to use commas would be to separate dependent clauses from independent clauses dependent clauses being incomplete thoughts and independent clauses being complete thoughts an example of this would be last night comma I went to the movies note that this rule is really just to separate a dependent clause from an independent clause meaning I could not have dependent comma dependent and I definitely could not have independent comma independent clause neither those work third rule is this one independent clause comma conjunction independent clause remember when I said you couldn't do independent clause comma independent clause that's still true and here it's different because we added a conjunction that's the only way this rule would work an example of this would be the test was fair really easy for me comma and that took a great weight off my chest note that if you're going to connect to an impendent Clauses with a comma you need the conjunction with it for it to work if you're not going to have a conjunction with it then you need to choose some other kind of punctuation maybe a period or even a semicolon the last way to use commas would be for a positives if you're not familiar with the word a positive here's an example of one Clifford comma the big grag dog comma eats a lot of food our a positive would be the phrase enclosed in commas the Big Red Dog if it's an A positive you should be able to take that phrase out of the sentence and leave a grammatical sentence Clifford eats a lot of food is a grammatical sentence so I would call that phrase in the middle and a positive this is blocked off by commas or it could even be blocked off by dashes I hope that was helpful remember that the AC English asks a lot of questions about commas and you will see questions where they're used incorrectly so take the time to memorize the rules we learned about today and practice them hi I'm Mary if you liked this video then you'll love the ACT course I helped author with achievable achievable includes everything you need to get a top score we have a comprehensive online textbook more videos just like these on dozens of key topics a built-in study planner to keep you on track hundreds of chapter review questions and plenty of full length practice exams our courses are competitively priced and you can try them out for free first to see if our style is the right fit for you follow the links below to get started