Coordination

by Dee Charles, student, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, 1998
"The thing to be, with one person who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous."  ----Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle"   

Coordination is one of  the mechanisms which allow literary artists such as Mr. James to create horrendous sentences such as this one.  Coordination is simply turning the parts of speech into building blocks and arranging them in different slots. Important to the understanding of coordination is knowing what words fall under the categories of Correlative and Coordinating conjunctions.
  *Correlative conjunctions: neither/nor, either/or, both/and
  *Coordinating conjunction: and, but, or, nor, for, yet
 
Here are some ways that English speakers can use conjunctions to combine these building blocks in sentences:

Compound Subjective Complement:

 
 
Compound Sentence:  
Compound Prenoun Adjective:  

Compound Auxiliary:

 

Compound Direct Object:

 

Compound Verb:

 

Compound Verb Phrase:

 

Compound Appositive:

 
 

Punctuation of Coordinate Structures

As the sentences above illustrate, commas should appear before conjunctions when those conjunctions join independent clauses (Sentence 2) or elements in a list of more than two words (Sentence 6).  They also should separate two adjectives before a noun if you could read the sentence with an "and" where the comma is (Sentence 1).  In most other cases, commas are not necessary in coordinate structures.

 
 

Exercises

Please punctuate the following sentences. (You may eliminate a conjunction, if necessary.)

1) Molly ate cookies with Mickey this morning and will eat lunch with him this afternoon.
 

2) Although Sandy's facelift looks good now I believe this time next year she will have a swollen and scarred and wrinkled face.

3) I forced Will to spend over fifteen thousand dollars on jewelry clothes and luggage for my trip to Puerto Rico.

4) The house that I bought in 1987 an English Tudor burned to the ground and left  me with only my two summer cottages in Aspen and Miami.
 
 

Subject - Verb Agreement

Singular subjects should take singular verbs, and plural subjects should take plural verbs. Nouns and noun phrases that act as subjects and are joined by the conjunction and are considered to be plural. Example: My dog and cat stare at each other ominously.  When two nouns in the subject are joined with the coordinating conjunction or, the correlative conjunction either/or, or the correlative conjunction neither/nor, make the verb agree with whichever noun is closer to it. Example: Neither Jennifer nor her friends want to come to your party. Example:  Either the roaches or he is going to clean the kitchen, because I am not.
 
 

Elliptical Constructions

In elliptical constructions, there is often something eliminated, "the understood." Often "the understood" isn't clear and leaves the meaning of the sentence open to ambiguity.  Example:
Our new hamster and potbelly pig are sleeping in the cupboard.  The ambiguity in this sentence
derives from the position of the adjective "new."   The reader is left to wonder if both the hamster and the potbelly pig are new or if just the hamster is new. A clearer sentence: Our potbelly pig and new hamster are sleeping in the cupboard.  Some elliptical constructions, however, are very useful .
Example: I haven't been to the new club, but Jimmy has.
 

Three keys to building compound sentences:

1) coordinating conjunctions
2) semicolons
3) on some occasions, the colon
 
 

Examples: