coordination
Coordination
is when you combine two independent clauses using a coordinating
conjunction. What this means is that you have two complete thoughts that
could stand alone as sentences, but you have decided to combine these two
simpler sentences into one that reflects a more sophisticated form of writing by
using one of seven words that work to combine complete thoughts with one
another. These seven words are called COORDINATING
CONJUNCTIONS, and if you can remember a simple word, you will
always remember the seven coordinating conjunctions. When you want to
combine sentences using coordination, just think of the word FANBOYS.
Yep, that's right, FANBOYS. It is an acronym, a word in which the letters
represent the first letter in a word (e.g., NATO stands for North Atlantic
Treaty Organization). FANBOYS represents the seven coordinating
conjunctions: For, And, Nor, But, Or,
Yet, So. When you line them up, it's easier to see
where the word FANBOYS comes from:
For
And
Nor
But
Or
Yet
So
If you take the first letter from each word, you end up with
the acronym FANBOYS. So when you want to combine sentences using
coordination, all you have to remember is FANBOYS. When you use a
coordinating conjunction to combine two simple sentences into a larger, more
complicated one , it is (not surprisingly) called coordination. The new
sentence that you made from the two simple sentences is now called a compound
sentence. There's a very simple formula that you can use to combine
sentences in this way. Let's take a look at it:
(Independent Clause) ,
CC (Independent
Clause) .
Here's an example of a real sentence so that you can see how
this functions.
Billy
was hungry ,
so he
cooked some eggs.
In this model, the two
independent clauses are those simple sentences that you want to combine into a
longer, more sophisticated sentence. The CC
stands for the COORDINATING CONJUNCTION
that you must insert between the two independent clauses in order to
successfully combine them into a compound sentence. Note that you MUST put
a comma directly following the
first independent clause and before the coordinating
conjunction. If you do not have both the comma and the coordinating
conjunction, then you do not have a properly written compound sentence.
Now that you have the basic idea of how to construct a compound sentence using
coordination, try the exercises on the computer in The
Writing Center to test your
comprehension. If you are still having problems visualizing coordination,
try the following link to give you a different view of the concept:
You can also view some PowerPoint presentations at this
link:
Good luck with coordination! You'll get the hang of it
in no time.
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