The difference between a comma and a cat

I had a collection of joke books as a child, and there’s one riddle that I remember very prominently, mostly because it was the one joke I didn’t quite understand at the time:

What’s the difference between a comma and a cat?
One is the pause at the end of a clause, and the other has claws at the end of its paws!

Very cute, yes? I may not have known what a clause was, but by golly I knew there was a comma at the end of it!

I have learned better since then, so let’s explore what I’ve discovered about clauses in the intervening years.

What is a clause, exactly?

Clauses and phrases are very similar in that both are short groups of words about a specific thing. The difference is that a clause always contains both a verb (or action)* and a subject (the person or thing performing the action), whereas phrases don’t have to include these things.

Phrases:

Before the ice runs out

A hot, summery day in August

Clauses:

The bear was under the bed

I can always guess the killer on TV

Sometimes, the subject may not be explicitly given, but rather implied, such as in the case of direct address:

Don’t [you] forget to hang the laundry out!

[You] pass the remote, please.

*Remember that this includes passive verbs (i.e. “being” words) as well as active ones: saying “the cat is round” may not be much of an action contextually, but grammatically speaking—and in the world of cats—the state of existence is action enough to be getting on with.

What types of clauses are there?

The main two types, as I mentioned in my post on semicolons, are independent clauses and dependent ones. An independent clause is one that is capable of standing on its own as a sentence, but a dependent one cannot; this means that every sentence must contain at least one clause which must be independent. There is no real limit to the number of clauses you can string together as far as grammar is concerned, so long as you join everything up correctly, though your readers might balk if you go much beyond three.

Independent:

There’s a storm coming

I’m going to tie down the trampoline

Dependent:

Although the radio says otherwise

In case the wind picks up

A subset of dependent clauses is the relative or adverbial clause. This is a clause that gives some context or condition to the connected clause, and begins with one of the following words:

• When
• While
• Where
• As
• Since
• If
• Although
• Whereas
• Unless
• Because

These clauses modify the clause they are connected to, and can change the meaning of the sentence as a whole quite significantly:

• Although the radio says otherwise
• Unless I somehow find a winning lottery ticket

The handy mnemonic I use to remember this list, by the way, is “www.asia.wub”.

How can we stick clauses together?

This depends on the type of clauses being attached. If one (or both) of your clauses is dependent, you’ll want to stick to your trusty comma, as the joke suggests:

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

There aren’t any crackers left, because you ate them all yesterday, so we’ll have to go get more.

When you have two independent clauses to join, however, there are a few options. You could, for instance, use a semicolon if you want to imply a connection between two clauses in a subtle way, as we explored in a previous post. Or, if you want to show a hierarchy of importance between your clauses, or a sense of cause and effect, you may opt for a colon instead:

There was only one thing Frances could do in this situation: she pulled the fire alarm.

I made the best-looking pie of the day: it had a lattice design wreathed in vines, and a cluster or pastry roses in the corner.

Another punctuation option that’s similar in function to the semicolon while having quite different vibes is an em-dash—we’ve seen those in a previous post as well.

But if you want to be really clear about how your independent clauses relate to each other, mere punctuation isn’t going to cut it; this is where you need a conjunction! You can read a whole post about those too.

That’s about all I can squeeze in this week, but if you have any questions about clauses (or anything else), or want to suggest a topic for a future Grammar Talk post, don’t hesitate to get in touch! And stay tuned for next month, when we look at another angle of the joke we started with…

Happy writing, cool cats!