(Otherwise known as fun times with zombies.) Grammar (Otherwise known as fun times with zombies.)

they’re, their, there they’re = they are their = belonging to them there = in that place

they’re, their, there They’re eating their dinner in there. Their dinner is brains because they’re zombies, so it’s messy in there. There aren’t many cooking shows for zombies because their tastes are limited; they’re just going to eat the brains raw anyway.

compound sentences A compound sentence has two sections that could stand alone. This means it has two (grammatical) subjects and two verbs.

compound sentences The hapless townspeople screamed, and the zombie horde advanced menacingly. This is a compound sentence because it has two different subject-verb units: “townspeople screamed” and “horde advanced.”

compound sentences The hapless townspeople screamed and stared in horror at the zombie horde. This is not a compound sentence. It has two verbs, but they’re both connected to the same subject.

commas in compound sentences The two halves of a compound sentence need to be joined with both a comma and a conjunction.

commas in compound sentences The hapless townspeople screamed and ran. (No comma. The subject stays the same, and we’re just adding another verb.) The hapless townspeople screamed, and then they ran in the wrong direction. (Use a comma. We have another subject in the second part of the sentence.)

comma splices The hapless townspeople screamed, the zombie horde advanced menacingly. (This is a comma splice, since it’s a compound sentence and should have both a comma and a conjunction to join the parts.) The hapless townspeople screamed, and the zombie horde advanced menacingly. (This is how we fix it: by adding a conjunction after the comma.)

dangling modifiers Lurching dangerously close to me, I fled the zombie hoard. (Grammatically, the part before the comma modifies “I,” but that doesn’t make much sense.) Lurching dangerously close to me, the zombies pursued. I fled the zombie hoard, which lurched dangerously close to me. (These rephrasing options clearly attach the modifier to the noun it describes.)

dangling modifiers Fleeing the zombie hoard, my cell phone vibrated. (This one implies that the speaker’s cell phone vibrated while it was fleeing the zombie hoard – an unlikely scenario at best.) As I fled the zombie horde, my cell phone vibrated. (Again, we clarify what noun the modifier describes. In this case that noun wasn’t in the original sentence at all, and we had to add it.)

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