Posted by Chikako · January 15, 2012 · 4 replies
In the sentence below, am I right about the usage of the comma after a subordinate clause?
When I asked her, "Would you like a cup of tea?", she said, "No, thank you."
I am not confident about ...?",
Would anybody tell me if the comma is necessary or not?
Or, is there any other better way to write?
Thank you.
Chikako
Yes - but it's oh so clumsy with all that punctuation. If you change to reported speech, you can avoid it and it reads much more fluently : When I asked her if she would like a cup of tea, she said no.
Hi, Susan. Thank you for your reply. I see. The sentence you suggested looks neater. Thank you for your suggestion. It was very helpful to me.
I would just remove the quotes for the last line so the sentence reds more smoothly.
There is a useful post here which explains when to use commas - comma punctuation
