Another Comma Question

Word Trance

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Ex: I heard Mike bought a house and the town is pretty small.

So, my question is, do you use a comma before "and" in this sentence? Or maybe it's just that the meaning changes with or without a comma.

I usually always use a comma when there is another subject and verb on the other side of the conjunction, but this type of sentence throws me off because I feel like "I heard" applies to "a house" and "the town is pretty small." And I feel like a comma before "and" would negate that "I heard" applies to both parts of the sentence.


Does the comma change the meaning of the sentence? So with it, "the town is pretty small" would just be a separate remark the speaker is making and not what the speaker "heard."

I hope that's not too confusing. Thanks for any help you can provide.
 

King Neptune

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I would rewrite that, if it isn't dialogue. If it is in dialogue, then I don't think the two clauses shouldn't be in the same sentence.
I heard Mike bought a house. And the town is pretty small.

 

Chase

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Ex: I heard Mike bought a house and the town is pretty small.

So, my question is, do you use a comma before "and" in this sentence? Or maybe it's just that the meaning changes with or without a comma.

Because it's two main clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction, the necessary punctuation as the sentence stands: I heard Mike bought a house, and the town is pretty small.

In this particular case, ambiguity can't be fixed by omitting a comma, as KN says. True salvation is rewriting a poor construction.

All of us need to rewrite stuff like that :D
 
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guttersquid

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This is my thought:

This is not really a case of connecting two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction. To see what I mean, add the missing "thats."

I heard that Mike bought a house and that the town is pretty small.

Do this and you see that "and that the town is really small" is a fragment, not an independent clause.

The subject is Mike, and the verb is heard, so "bought a house and the town is pretty small" is a two-item list of what Mike heard.

Using a comma makes "Mike bought a house" and "the town is pretty small" two separate and distinct thoughts, and I don't think that's the intention here. The intention here is only to state what Mike heard.

My conclusion is that a comma would be wrong.
 

Word Trance

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That's what I was thinking. That the two parts of the sentence are like two items. I heard this and that.
 
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blacbird

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The presence or absence of a comma isn't the real problem here, for me, as reader. It's that the two items seem irrelevantly connected. I think you'd do better to reduce the second clause to a prepositional phrase that more clearly relates it to the main focus of the sentence:

I heard Mike bought a house in a town that was pretty small.

or perhaps even better:

Ii heard that Mike bought a house in a pretty small town.

And you have to be careful with the order of modifiers, too. Is it a "pretty small town", or a "small pretty town"? As comedian George Carlin once said on a live TV show, "On television, you can prick your finger, but you can't finger your prick."*

Point being that there are a lot of ways to rephrase this sentence that can solve your problem, which is true of most problematical sentences. Tinkering with the punctuation usually isn't the best way to handle this kind of difficulty.

caw

* One of the things that got in into trouble with the TV gods.
 
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BethS

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Ex: I heard Mike bought a house and the town is pretty small.

So, my question is, do you use a comma before "and" in this sentence?

It depends. Are you saying that you heard Mike bought a house and that you also heard the town was small? No comma. Are you just stating facts? Mike bought a house. The town is pretty small. Then, yes, a comma is correct.

Whether or not you actually want that to be all one sentence is another question.
 
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