Punctuation is a killer; quite literally sometimes because if you get it wrong, nothing you write will make sense. Let’s take the humble comma. Many writers place them where instinct tells them to or they will place a comma where they would pause naturally in a sentence.

Instinct isn’t always right and readers aren’t necessarily going to pause in the same place that you do.

And one of the biggest mistakes made by many writers is the “split compound predicate.”

What on earth is that? To explain, I need to go back a bit first.

One whole sentence is known as an independent clause. It is made up of a subject and a verb and we call it “independent” because it is a whole sentence and it works by itself.

Broadly speaking, a sentence subject will also include phrases or words that describe the subject. The verb, the action, is known as a “predicate” and that one term covers all the different bits of a sentence that change the verb meaning.

For the purposes of this series, we’ll just use “subject” and “predicate” in a basic sense. An example:

“Sally runs on the path.”

So, Sally is the sentence subject and “runs” is the predicate or verb. The subject is known as a simple subject because there is just the one – Sally. More than one and it would be called a compound subject. The predicate is a simple predicate because there is just the one verb – runs.

We could add another verb to this sentence, one that goes with our subject:

“Sally runs and jumps on the path.”

We still have a single subject but we have two verbs now – runs and jumps.

When we use two verbs to describe two different actions made by the subject, it is known as a compound predicate.

Here are a couple more examples:

“My friend skates and cycles.”

“Hannah sings and plays the guitar.”

“Andy draws and paints.”

We don’t need to use a comma in any of these sentences because each one only has a single independent clause despite having compound predicates.

Let’s see those sentences divided with a misplaced comma. Read these sentences aloud and pause where the comma is:

“My friend skates, and cycles.”

“Hannah sings, and plays the guitar.”

“Andy draws, and paints.”

Which sentences sound better – the first set or the second?

If any pause is present in the sentences without a comma, it will likely be a tiny pause just after the subject because your eyes will be looking ahead to see what’s next. You could drag the subject out a little as your eyes scan the sentence ahead and the verbs would be said quite quickly, almost as though they were a single word. The pause would be so small that it isn’t noticeable and there really isn’t any need to use a comma and there isn’t a punctuation rule that says its right to do so.

In the next part, we’ll delve a bit deeper into the life of the comma.