Saturday, December 26, 2015

Including a comma at the end of a list before a dependent clause





I have this sentence on my resume:




Develop the front-end of a platform using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to connect people and systems





Is there a comma after Bootstrap? I wanted to elaborate on the reason for building the application rather than simply listing the programming languages I used.


Answer



If the platform uses HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to connect people and systems, I can't see any advantage to introducing a pause before "using"—and you certainly wouldn't gain anything by putting a comma after "Bootstrap." That is, the minimally punctuated sentence




Develop the front end of a platform using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap to connect people and systems.




conveys the intended meaning just fine.




On the other hand, if you developed the front end of a platform to connect people and systems, and you accomplished this by using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, you might well want to use some sort of punctuation—paired commas, open and close parentheses, or paired em dashes—to break out the phrase "using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap," to indicate that the phrase constitutes an independent clause in the larger sentence. That is,




Develop the front end of a platform, using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, to connect people and systems.




or





Develop the front end of a platform (using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap) to connect people and systems.




or




Develop the front end of a platform—using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap—to connect people and systems.




would convey the intended meaning in this second scenario.



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