Great explanation of commas with names and titles from the New York Times
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/the-most-comma-mistakes/?hp
Commas and parentheses: when can you double up?
This is another one of those finicky little rules that have the potential to show up on the SAT and ACT. It’s an annoying one because it involves not one but two kinds of punctuation, in this case commas and parentheses (which aren’t tested all that frequently), but it’s not overly tricky to apply. In fact, if you look back at the previous sentence, you’ll see that I just used it.
Here’s the whole rule:
It is never acceptable to use a comma before an open parenthesis, but it is sometimes acceptable to use a comma after a close parenthesis.
In other words, the construction below is always incorrect:
Incorrect: The Caribbean Sea contains some of the world’s most stunning coral reefs, (which are home to thousands of species of marine life) but many of them are in danger because of overfishing and pollution.
It also means that you cannot do the following: (more…)
How to answer add/delete/revise questions on the SAT and ACT
The ACT English section tests both reading and writing skills simultaneously, and it is necessary to change your approach based on the type of question you are being asked. While grammar questions require you to recall specific rules, rhetoric questions require you to apply specific concepts about how paragraphs and essays work: what makes an effective transition (what is the logical relationship between two ideas?); how a paragraph is most logically developed; and what constitutes relevant vs. irrelevant information.
Unlike grammar questions, rhetoric questions can be absolutely, perfectly grammatically correct yet still be wrong. You can’t be fooled by how they sound — you actually have to think (yes, think!) about whether they go along with the main idea of the passage or paragraph in question.
In short, they’re reading questions, not writing questions. And because this is the case, you have to treat them like reading questions.
That means going back to the passage, figuring out the gist of the section you’re being asked to deal with, and figuring out what sort of information would be relevant.
One of the biggest mistakes I consistently see people make on rhetoric questions is to start by looking at the answers and assuming they’ll remember the content well enough to sort everything out rather than going back to the passage and working out the answer for themselves beforehand.
When most people read the passages as they’re working through the questions, though, they’re usually only really paying attention to grammar rather than content. They’re not thinking about main ideas and supporting information but rather about whether that comma in #27 was really supposed to be there. So when they’re asked to insert/delete information, they don’t really have the full context for it.
Remember: the readings on the English section are pretty simple. It’s usually not too hard to figure out their main idea and thus whether a particular sentence or part of a sentence should be used to support it. Yes, it may take a whole 30 seconds, but that’s time better spent actually figuring out the answer than staring at two options and trying to decide between them. So to sum up:
1) Read the question and identify exactly what you’re being asked to insert or delete.
2) Go back to the passage and read as much as you need to figure out the main idea of the passage or paragraph. For questions that ask about the passage as a whole, check the title: it’s there to tell you what the passage is about. For questions that ask you about the middle of a paragraph, read the topic sentence. Conversely, if you’re asked to insert the first sentence of a paragraph, jump ahead and read the middle of the paragraph.
3) Ask yourself whether the information in question is relevant to that topic and why/why not.
4) Look at the answers. The right one should pretty much pop out at you.
Present Perfect, Simple Past, and Past Perfect
Present perfect = has written
The present perfect is used to describe an action that began in the past and that is continuing into the present. It is usually used in conjunction with the words for and since, which serve as “tip-offs” that this tense is required.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels since 1977.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko has written best-selling novels for more than thirty years.
Although these sentences describe actions that began in the past, they both clearly imply that that Leslie Marmon Silko is *still* a best-selling author.
Simple past = wrote
The simple past is used to describe an action that began and ended in the past.
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
OR
Correct: Leslie Marmon Silko was twenty-nine years old when she published her first novel.
On the SAT, sentences that require the simple past typically include a date or time period that clearly indicates a past action or event (e.g. 1815, The Renaissance, etc.).
Past perfect = had written
This is the tense that people tend to have the hardest time with. It is used only in the following case: when you have two finished actions in the past, the past perfect is used to describe the one that happened first.
In other words, if a sentence does not clearly indicate two separate actions, you should not use the past perfect!
Correct: Before Leslie Marmon Silko published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she had already written a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #1: Leslie Marmon Silko published a number of well-regarded short stories.
Action #2: Leslie Marmon Silko wrote her first best-selling novel in 1977.
The past perfect is therefore used to describe the first action.
Under no circumstances is the following correct:
Incorrect: Before Leslie Marmon Silko had published her first best-selling novel in 1977, she wrote a number of well-regarded short stories.
When is a noun not a noun?
When is a noun not a noun?
Answer: when it’s an adjective.
One of the ACT’s favorite ways to play with you is to take words that normally act like nouns — often professions such as author, architect, scientist, etc. — and use them as adjectives. This might not seem like much of a big deal, or even something you’d really need to pay attention to, except that it actually involves something the ACT absolutely loves to test: commas.
Consider the following: You probably wouldn’t write something like “I.M. Pei is a celebrated, architect.” Even if you don’t know that “famous” is an adjective and that “architect” is a noun, you can probably feel that the comma is wrong there; there’s no natural break in the sentence.
But what about this?
Glass is perhaps the building material most often associated with celebrated architect, I.M. Pei.
Suddenly that comma seems like it could be ok. Perhaps you learned that you always put a comma before a person’s name.
Well, sometimes you do, but sometimes you don’t. And this is one of those cases in which you don’t.
The reason is that “architect,” in this case,” is being used to describe I.M. Pei. Even though “architect” looks like a noun, it’s acting as an adjective here. And since adjectives should never be separated from the nouns they describe by a comma, you do not need to place one between “architect” and “I.M. Pei.”
“But” or “yet” between adjectives = no comma
One of the ACT’s preferred tricks is to give you a sentence that looks like the following:
Millions of pedal-assisted electric bicycles have already been sold in Asian countries, such as China, where bicycles often serve as a cheap, yet efficient mode of transport.
A. NO CHANGE
B. cheap; yet efficient
C. cheap, yet efficient
D. cheap yet efficient
Because it seems natural to pause before the word yet many people’s instinct is to insert a comma at that point in the sentence.
However, the rule is that when two adjectives are separated by a conjunction (typically but or yet, although and could be tested as well), no comma should be used before the conjunction.
In this case, cheap and efficient are both adjectives, so no comma is necessary. The answer is therefore D.
You can also think of the rule this way: comma + but/yet = period.
When you plug in a period, you get nonsense:
Millions of pedal-assisted electric bicycles have already been sold in Asian countries, such as China, where bicycles often serve as a cheap. Efficient mode of transport.
If a period doesn’t work, neither does comma + but/yet.