If you liked this article and found it helpful, you might also like our other articles on our Grammar Rules blog. Don’t use a comma the rest of the time.Use a comma before ‘but’ if connecting two independent clauses.Well, that concludes this article on the rules around using a comma before ‘but.’ I hope you agree with me that it’s pretty straightforward and that you should find this easy to use in the future. We heard you received a bonus but not him. I’m grateful for your offer but no thanks. Time flies when you’re having fun, but it goes so slowly when you’re bored. I understand your reasons, but if I were you I’d have taken the job. She likes milk chocolate, but she appreciates white chocolate, too. Hopefully, you find that as straightforward as me, but we’ll still take a look at some examples to illustrate further. I want to get some strawberries but not right now. In the above sentence, hopefully does not mean. Let me illustrate with an example of a sentence that uses the word ‘but,’ but no comma precedes it: Many grammarians believe that the word hopefully can only be used to mean with hope or in a hopeful manner. To know when not to use a comma before ‘but’ is pretty simple: unless it’s the circumstance described above (connecting two independent clauses), never use a comma. That’s why there’s a comma before ‘but.’ When Not to Use a Comma Before ‘But’ They don’t need each other to make sense. The sentence above contains two independent clauses joined by the conjunction ‘but.’ How you can tell they’re both independent clauses is that if they stood on their own, they would still make sense. I want to help, but I don’t know where to start. The only time you’ll ever use a comma before ‘but’ is when connecting two independent clauses.Īs a reminder, an independent clause is a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate that makes sense on its own. The first thing to know is that ‘but’ is a conjunction, and the rules I'm going to outline below about using a comma before it also apply to other conjunctions, such as ‘for,’ ‘yet,’ ‘and’ (except in the case of the Oxford comma). You’ll quickly learn when to use or not to use a comma before the word ‘but.’ The rules around this are actually pretty straightforward, so that’s the good news. Concluding Thoughts Using a Comma Before 'But' If you want to know more about how to use hopefully at the beginning of a sentence, perhaps these examples will break it down for you: Hopefully, there is going to be a new movie in this franchise that’s going to explain more about what went wrong in the.
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