I found a nice Google Chrome extension that checks your English called Grammarly. It’s definitely not perfect: it ignores quite a few errors (I think “comma’s” in the topic of this post should be “commas”) and it also gives a fair amount of false positives.
English is not my first language and I have a question about a complaint Grammarly constantly gives me: after a few word I get the error message “add a comma” or “add a comma at beginning of sentence”.
For example, in my last post I wrote:
Grammarly says I should add a comma after “for me”. To me this is counter-intuitive. What do you native English speakers say? Should I add a comma? I can give more examples, but I thought I’d start here.
It’s just a way to insert a natural pause when reading or speaking. In your example I believe it is correct to insert a comma there, but I don’t know the grammatical rule to give you, sorry Mark!
I agree with Grammarly, Marc and Josh. There needs to be a comma after “For me.” Is this maybe a bit confusing because it’s spoken differently in English than in German - and probably Dutch? In English, there is a distinct pause after “For me.” The pause is to let the listener mentally insert the “as opposed to other people” inference. I don’t think that’s done in German, but truthfully, I don’t know enough about German to be sure. My German is strictly familial and is really limited, so this is just a guess as to why it might not look right to you.
OK, I’ll upload a few more examples (the coming days, when I get this tip again) of cases where I have serious doubts. Hopefully you guys can judge those too.
In Dutch - and you’re right, Tom, German - there should definitely no comma, and (thanks, Josh ) no pause when you speak, too.
Thanks, MarcH! I think our education system here is quite good. I wrote my first article for an English magazine when I was 16. I wrote a book in English, lived for half a year in Australia, and regularly give courses in the UK and Canada.
But still my English is not perfect and I want to improve it. So I grab every opportunity . Any thoughts on the comma suggestions in the previous posts?
P.S. I added a comma in this post after “thanks”, after a suggestion of Grammarly.
[quote quote=38417]And here we have the first candidate. In the previous post I wrote
Hopefully you guys can judge those too.
Should there be a comma after “hopefully”? Grammarly says so. And in this post Grammarly suggests a comma after “post” in
In the previous post I wrote
Again a case where I would not write a comma in Dutch or German, but should I in English? Thanks! [/quote]
Correct - “In the previous post, I wrote…”
Correct - “Hopefully, you guys can judge those too.”
As Josh said, the commas are often placed when you have a natural pause in the sentence and that can vary from one speaker to another. At other times, the comma can have a strong impact on the meaning of the sentence.
While I’ve had a number of non-English speakers complain to me about the lack of consistency in English spelling and pronunciation, I’ve heard that English is probably the most developed in terms of grammatical structure. Sentence structures and punctuation are context-driven and therefor less ambiguous than most other languages. Maybe why all commercial aviation uses English as a cockpit language? I follow the rule that casual writing is less restrictive. Your use of commas may follow your speaking patterns, but should not alter the context of your meaning. Including a comma (or not) in any of the cases you show wouldn’t change their intended meaning.
I don’t know, but, I was taught to use a comma any time there would be a natural pause in your speaking, or a change of direction and expansion of a statement. I am not, however, an English major or even college educated, so…
, but I use a lot of commas, in my posts.
