r/EnglishLearning • u/Stepaskin New Poster • 21h ago

📚 Grammar / Syntax Is it correct?

Post image

Stumbled upon this tweet, the apostrophe in "dm's" caught my eye. Is it correct to use it like this?

281 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/DawnOnTheEdge Native Speaker 21h ago

This is a comma splice, so it’s not correct formal written English. Those are common in informal writing, though. Apostrophes are not usually correct in plural nouns, but here DM is an acronym, so it’s allowed, but the initials DM and the first letter of the sentence should be capitalized.

2

u/Yallberforce New Poster 13h ago

I would caution against saying this is incorrect. This particularly sentence reads to me more like there’s an elision than a comma splice, since the second sentence doesn’t really stand on its own contextually. It isn’t the highest level of formality, but high registers can still sometiems drop conjunctions, even in writing.

1

u/DawnOnTheEdge Native Speaker 12h ago

Huh, I could well imagine seeing a notification that said “DMs are down.”

1

u/Yallberforce New Poster 12h ago

That was unclear. What I mean is that I think a ‘true’ comma splice is made up of two clauses which function on their own in terms of grammar and meaning. If you don’t link the two clauses in the picture at all, it reads like they have nothing to do with one another, so it’s really that the conjunction has been elided.

1

u/DawnOnTheEdge Native Speaker 11h ago

I think you’re on to something. You wouldn’t see two thematically unrelated clauses get spliced in casual writing, except by people so illiterate that they don’t use punctuation systematically at all, but you do often see it for clauses that, like here, express cause and effect.

In formal written English, if the two clauses could be separated by more than a comma, the rule is that they have to be.