ShmoopTube

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Buckle up -- it's question time... What should replace the underlined portion

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of the following sentence, if anything?

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Kyle really wanted to go skateboarding and was hoping that Joe would go with him.

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And here are the potential answers:

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It's all about AND. When does it need a comma?

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The first part of the sentence is INDEPENDENT. Kyle really wanted to go skateboarding. That's it.

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It's an independent sentence. It can live on its own.

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So if we mess around with the second part, we're going to have problems.

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The "and was hoping that Joe would go with him" is a fragment -- it's a DEPENDENT clause.

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In other words, it depends on the first part to ... connect it to the land of proper grammar.

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So in this case A is wrong because this sentence doesn't need a comma -- the "and" joins it

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without needing any noted separation.

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Note that C is wrong because these evil testers left out the word "go" which would really

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mess things up.

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So the answer is D.

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As in, "Don't need to do a thing."

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