User:Bobo Fernandez

Bobo Fernandez is a mysterious individual with a strange infatuation with the town of Boxborough, Massachusetts.

He is also very concerned with grammatrical errors on Wikipedia. A couple of common errors he likes to correct are ...

1) The word "which," unless preceded by a preposition, must be separated from the word it modifies with a comma. The word "that" should not be separated from the word it modifies through use of a comma.  Hence, "that" is often used when "which" should be used, and visa versa.  The difference between these two words can be explained through use of examples.  For instance, compare the phrase, "The tree, which he liked, was cut down" to the phrase, "The tree that he liked was cut down."  The first phrase uses the word "which" because the details being provided about the tree are essentially a side note.  The second phrase uses the word "that" because the details being provided about the tree are central to the meaning of the phrase.  The two words, thereby, cannot be used interchangably, because one ("which") is meant to be used with commas to denote information that is peripheral to the meaning of a phrase but still relevant, whereas the other ("that") is used to explain information that is pertinent to the meaning of a phrase.

2) When three items are listed in a series, each item, except for the last, must be followed by a comma. Hence, the phrase "red, white, and blue" is correct, whereas the phrase "red, white and blue" is incorrect.  When only one comma is used, and no comma follows the second item in the series, the meaning of the phrase changes, so that the second two words in the series are now modifying the first word.  An example comes from a Robert Frost poem, where he wrote, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep."  Frost did not mean to say that the woods were lovely and dark and also deep.  He meant to say that the woods were lovely, and the words "dark and deep" qualify the word "lovely" because they are not separated by a comma.  Hence, "dark and deep" explain why the woods are lovely.  Had he written "the woods were lovely, dark, and deep" the phrase would have an entirely different meaning.  Hence, "red, white and blue" is nonsense, while "red, white, and blue" is grammatrically correct.