Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[winkysec]

My teacher has told me that comma and full stop are quite different in English.And sometimes problem solving is according to them.

And now,please see a question.
We know that the following sentences are correct:
1.The mother came in,carried a cake with ten lighted candles on it and said "Happy Birthday" to the little boy.

2.The mother came in,carrying a cake with ten lighted candles on it, and said "Happy Birthday" to the little boy.

The reason why these two sentences are correct is in the first sentence,the verbs are "came in,carried....and said".
In the second sentence,the verbs are"came in...and said",and "carrying" is adverbial modifier.

However,can I say :
3.The mother came in,carried a cake with ten lighted candles on it,and said "Happy Birthday" to the little boy.
In another way,I wonder if I can regard the word "carry" as a verb instead of regarding "carry"as adverbial modifier in sentence 3.

Oh.That's my question.Maybe I didn't make my question clearly.I am sorry.
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Winky has made many mistakes in her compositions.Sorry about that.But she has confidence in doing it better!

[CP]

Both sentence 1 and sentence 3 are the same, with the same meaning. The only difference is the final comma. While keeping the comma is the better practice (in my opinion), because it eliminates ambiguity and preserves parallelism, many writers today leave out the comma before the "and" in a series.

Your series in these sentences is the three verbs: she came in; she carried a cake; and she said "Happy birthday" to the boy.

The sentence would be improved by wording it:

The mother carried in a cake with 10 lighted candles and said "Happy birthday" to the boy.
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You live a new life for every new language you speak. -Czech proverb