Opening and Closing Supplements
In this lesson, you will learn to
- Identify opening and closing supplements
- Use commas to punctuate opening supplements correctly
- Use commas, dashes, and parentheses to punctuate closing supplements correctly
- Solve questions involving opening and closing supplements
In Lesson 5: Interruptions, you learned about interruptions, which are also called supplementary elements within sentences (i.e., they occur in the middle of sentences).
However, supplementary elements can also appear at the beginning and end of sentences, where they provide additional details about what is being discussed. Just like interruptions, these supplementary elements need to be set off from the rest of the sentence with punctuation.
Like interruptions, such supplements cannot contain a sentence's main subject or main (finite) verb—and sentences should still make fundamental sense when such supplements are removed.
We will call supplementary elements at the beginning of sentences "opening supplements" and supplementary elements at the end of sentences "closing supplements".
Opening supplement✅ Known as the "lungs of the Earth," the Amazon is home to an astonishing variety of wildlife.
Closing supplement✅ The Amazon is home to an astonishing variety of wildlife, much of which is endangered.
Sentences may contain opening supplements, closing supplements, or both.
Opening supplementClosing supplement✅ Known as the "lungs of the Earth," the Amazon is home to an astonishing variety of wildlife, much of which is endangered.
✅ The Amazon is home to an astonishing variety of wildlife.
Keep going
The rest of this lesson is open to students with an access code.