TuesdACT Video Red Book English Test 1 #57 - Punctuation

ACT English Punctuation Questions and an Explanation for The Real ACT Prep Guide â€Å"Red Book† Test 1 Question 57 This week I’m tackling another frequently-missed question from the The Official ACT Prep Guide, aka the â€Å"Red Book.† (I’m looking at you, Practice Test 1, English Question 57, Page 160!) Check out the video for why this punctuation question is a bit tricky and for helpful tips on semicolons and commas on the test! Here’s the sentence in question: But in pinball, you have three factors to consider: you, the machine, and chance, which is sometimes your enemy sometimes your ally. NO CHANGE enemy, enemy; enemy, and, This sentence is a little more sophisticated in its phrasing than most of the sentences on the ACT English test, which is why it might catch you off guard. Here we have a rather elegant pairing of two opposite phrases: â€Å"sometimes your enemy† and â€Å"sometimes your ally,† which are modifying the word â€Å"chance.† Because ACT test-takers are so accustomed to attacking comma splices, it’s really easy to slip up here and think answer choice B is a comma splice. A comma splice, as you may remember is when a writer incorrectly joins together two complete sentences with only a comma. It’s a bad grammar mistake that the ACT tests over and over again. But this case is actually not a comma splice. â€Å"Sometimes your enemy† and â€Å"sometimes your ally† are not complete sentences, so it would not be an error to put just a comma between the phrases. Because they are not complete sentences that can stand alone, we also cannot use a ; or a â€Å", and† to join them (making C and D incorrect). But we DO need a break between the two phrases; we don’t want to just run them together as answer choice A does. Therefore, this question is an excellent example of how we use commas to create pauses. We need a pause here, so we need a comma, and our answer is B, â€Å"enemy,†.