Saturday, October 5, 2013

grammaticality - Is this sentence grammatically correct?



I would like to write a general sentence followed by a colon and three coordinate sentences in detail separated by commas.




For example:



I had a bad day: my phone was stolen, my leg was broken, and my girlfriend broke up with me.



I don't think it is grammatically correct but how should I correct it with similar sentence structure, or how do I correctly express my idea in this way? Thanks.


Answer



There's nothing wrong with the sentence.



There are some people who would tell you to remove the comma before "and" but I am not one of them. Keep the comma.




If your list included phrases that required commas, the commas to separate the items would be semi-colons:



What may sound strange is the odd passivitiy to "my leg was broken". I would usually say "I broke my leg" and not worry about forcing the items in the list to be parallel.


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