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I'm pretty comfortable with comma rules, and aside from occasional random typos, my punctuation rarely gets nit picked by critting buddies. But there's one thing I get some conflicting advice over: when is the second independent clause in a compound sentence short enough to allow me to drop the comma?
Here's a sentence of the type I mean (For context, "he" is my pov character, and "Nettle" is his horse):
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As far as I know, this is grammatically correct, since "Nettle needed shoeing" is an independent clause. But some critters cross out the comma there. I assume it's because "Nettle needed shoeing" is so short, omitting the comma would not cause any real confusion. But is it wrong to err on the side of caution and leave the comma in place? And if one decides to omit optional commas for very short, simple independent clauses after a coordinating conjunction, where's the cutoff? I used to leave commas out in sentences like this one, but some crittters put them in.
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Here's a sentence of the type I mean (For context, "he" is my pov character, and "Nettle" is his horse):
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He was almost out of money, and Nettle needed shoeing.
As far as I know, this is grammatically correct, since "Nettle needed shoeing" is an independent clause. But some critters cross out the comma there. I assume it's because "Nettle needed shoeing" is so short, omitting the comma would not cause any real confusion. But is it wrong to err on the side of caution and leave the comma in place? And if one decides to omit optional commas for very short, simple independent clauses after a coordinating conjunction, where's the cutoff? I used to leave commas out in sentences like this one, but some crittters put them in.
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