I recently had the misfortune of seeing a sign outside a chicken franchise that read hot, juicy, chicken. You can imagine my outrage!!!
It, of course, took us here at Language Lady to Comma Clues #2: Use Commas to Separate Two or More Describers (But Not Between the Describer and the Word Being Described!).
Two benchmarks that I teach for inserting commas between describers:
![[Video] Writing With Adjectives](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3936/33479806366_6e3ca61aea_z.jpg "[Video] Writing With Adjectives")
“Only use an adjective that will cause your reader to have a different picture in his mind than he would have without the adjective.”
One of the greatest homeschooling joys—and greatest challenges—during my thirty-two years of homeschooling has definitely been teaching my kids to read. My undergraduate degree is in elementary education, and my master’s work is in reading specialist. So, um, yeah, I should have been a specialist.
One of the best ways to get to a kid’s writing heart is to give him two things: (1) Writing projects with clear, “Directed” instructions every step of the way and (2) Fun writing topics!
Thankfully, my new Write On books offers both of these!
“Conjunction Junction—what’s your function?”
Did you start to sing along? Can you picture the images?
How old are you????? lol
Most kids today are not raised on “School House Rock,” which is such a shame! Because you really can’t forget the songs, jingles, rhymes—and dare I say—rules learned from those little ditties. (You can still find them on Youtube!)
And those little ditties are really needed when it comes to commas! Commas are a mystery to many people–and rightly so! They are extremely subjective at times across the board. And then, different handbooks and authorities stress different rules for them, making them even more elusive.
My co-author and co-teacher (and amazing first born) just asked me a crucial grammar question: “How can any program not start out teaching how to find prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses?”
Of course, this led to a lengthy discussion about the two—how students can isolate these and then match up their subjects and verbs correctly; how they are crucial for sentence variety with sentence openers; and much more. (I love these discussions with my grown kids!!! 🙂 )
I touched on this in my previous blog post, “Why Teach Prepositions” that you can find here at the blog.
