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Battlewizard
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Banned for using 3 full stops and then using a comma even though the sentence is already about to mention something else 

 

Periods are called full-stops in British English, which is helpful. It ends a sentence, period. 

Comma's meaning is probably a bit more opaque. It comes from the Greek practice of using marks to indicate how you read a passage out loud (diacritics). A comma was a short clause, a small piece of a piece, which took a short break to say well. (It used to also be a dot, but placed mid-line, not on the base line like full stops and commas appear now.)

Commas indicate a pause, generally, in a sentence. They can also be used to mark off a section of a sentence, like the one I used above. These tend to be simple, and not very off-topic. For more abrupt changes – which can quickly become overused – use en-dashes or parenthesis (which usually break out the sentence to talk directly to you, the reader).

We also use them to join two clauses together, often with the use of a conjunction. We start one thought, and we add another. Also, they're used in a kind of address – indicating the pause after a word like also, finally, or therefore. It is becoming more standard to leave out commas here, but I use them.

Finally, we use them to separate items in a list, or to stack adjectives against a noun. Thelowly, common comma separates words like joy, love, and peace. Using the final comma – the one before "and" or "or" – is a matter of choice. If you do, you are using the Oxford comma.

 
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