Writing: Within-sentence punctuation — Example 1

Chinese cuisine is more of a science than an art it requires experimentation trial and error and years of experience okay so this is a punctuation question we know that because we have you know a comma underlined in the original and then the choices choice B has a colon and then a comma choice C has a semicolon choice D has no punctuation at all and we can look at this by sort of asking ourselves what are the rules about colons and semicolons and commas and in short you know a colon is used to introduce an example a quotation a list or an explanation for something and in this case this is a bit of an explanation Chinese cuisine is more of a science and an art oh yeah well it requires experimentation trial and error and years of experience so it is a little bit of an explanation so a colon should work but the problem here is that that comma this comma here is making this whole answer wrong Chinese cuisine is more of a science and an art it requires experimentation no there's no extra pause there it doesn't make sense so we can cross that out then we have the semicolon we're thinking about and semicolons use two separate two independent clauses and an independent clause is a clause that could function on its own as a sentence so in this case let's check it out Chinese cuisine is more of a science than an art okay that could be its own sentence it requires experimentation trial and error and years experience okay it requires subject verb it requires those three things that also is a complete sentence a complete independent clause this is our answer we definitely do need punctuation because these commas all the punctuation offers pauses so one way to check commas for future questions you might approach is to just give them a little extra pause and see whether it sounds weird so in this case Chinese cuisine is more of a science and an art it requires you definitely need to pause there but in this case not a comma because as you get the two independent clauses and you also need to come after experimentation trial and error and years of experience so you need those commas as well