ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by scientists who specialize in coconuts.

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Hey, there’re worse things to do with your life.

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Check out the following passage.

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How would you correct the following underlined portion from the passage? Does it need correcting?

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the exocarp and the mesocarp,

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Here are the potential answers...

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To answer this question correctly, we need to wrestle with the eternal problem of how

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to correctly use commas.

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Let’s start by taking a look at (D), which places a comma after “exocarp.”

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This is incorrect because there’s no grammatical reason to place a comma here.

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Doing so unnecessarily separates “and the mesocarp” from the rest of the sentence.

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Guess we’d better move on before it gets separation anxiety.

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Maybe choice (C) will make a better show of itself.

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Nah, not really. Like (D), choice (C) places a comma after “exocarp.”

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Taking out the word “and” does nothing to make this choice grammatically correct.

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If anything, it makes the sentence even more confusing by tricking us

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into thinking we’ve got a list on our hands.

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Commas are only needed when more than two things are being listed.

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For example, if we were talking about the exocarp, mesocarp, and endocarp.

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Then we would need commas to separate them.

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This, of course, is not the case, so we can move on to the next option.

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OK, time to compare choices (A) and (B), which are having a serious disagreement.

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Choice (A) separates “the exocarp and the mesocarp” from the rest of the sentence

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with commas, while choice (B) uses no commas at all.

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The rule of thumb is that commas separate things that are nonessential to the sentence,

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while things that are essential should be comma-free.

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An easy way to tell if a part of a sentence is essential

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is to omit the part in question as you read the sentence out loud.

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Check it out: “when you buy a coconut at the super market are removed and what you see is the endocarp.”

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Wow, that was gibberish.

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Removing “the exocarp and the mesocarp” definitely takes something essential from the sentence.

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Therefore, comma-free choice (B) is the correct answer.

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A lesson learned the hard way: it’s best not to read sentences out loud while in public.

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