March 24, 2008
Writing
Tip of the Week
Appositives
An appositive
is a noun or a noun phrase that renames another noun or noun phrase.
Ø
When an
appositive provides information that is essential to the reader’s understanding
of the sentence, it is restrictive
and should not be separated by commas or other punctuation from the noun or
noun phrase to which it refers. An
appositive is nonrestrictive and
needs punctuation when it can be removed from the sentence without undermining
the sentence’s meaning.
Former
- John
F. Kennedy is restrictive—“Which
former
- A
former U.S. Marine is
nonrestrictive because it provides additional information and needs
punctuation to be grammatically correct.
Calvin Murphy, the former Houston Rocket
and television analyst, was prosecuted in
o
The former
Ø
Nonrestrictive
appositives are usually set apart from the rest of the sentence by commas. For emphasis, however, or for
clarity when the appositive contains commas, you may set them off with dashes. A nonrestrictive appositive
occurring at the end of a sentence may also be set off with a colon.
The police arrested him on two counts,
speeding and driving without a valid license, and took him off to jail.
The police arrested him on three counts—speeding,
driving without a valid license, and driving under the influence—and took
him off to jail.
The police arrested him on two counts:
speeding and driving without a valid license.
Ø
An
appositive has the same grammatical function as the noun to which it refers.
When in doubt about the case of a pronoun in an appositive, you can check it by
substituting the pronoun for the noun to which the appositive refers.
My boss gave the two of us, Jim and me,
the day off.
o
Try
substituting “me” or “I” for “the two of us”: “My boss gave me the day off,” not
“My boss gave I the day off.”
Adapted
from: Writing from A to Z—Ebnest, Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu
Prepared
by Andrew C. Smith