Indicate your opinion about Virtual Learning

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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namssab1nad Piers wrote:

Actually, all of you are wrong.  As far as punctuation differences between UK and USA, there are virtually none.  Here is how the sentence should have been constructed.

"The concern of the research is addressed to Second Life, a well-known virtual world; and to open sim, a novel technology recently used by the public for the development of virtual worlds".

Since he is writing about two different virtual worlds, the semi-colon......etc, etc, etc

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Nope.  A semi-colon connects two independent clauses.  Which means that each clause can stand on it's own as a sentence.  The two adjoining clauses above, are not meant to be independent, and would make poor separate sentences.  Thus, no semi-colon is warranted. 

 

[Phil Deakins]

The correct use of semi-colons confuses me - as it does most people, I think, so I don't often use them. In fact, the only time I use one may be grammatically wrong; e.g. like that.

 

@the OP

Your sentence needed the comma, just like everyone said. There is no difference in UK english (I'm a Yorkshireman, btw) and I can assure you that you missed the comma out, which caused the sentence to mean something different to what you intended it to mean. It's pointless defending it - it was wrong.

[Phil Deakins]

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namssab1nad Piers wrote:

Since he is writing about two different virtual worlds, the semi-colon should be used to show that Open Sim is completely different from "Second Life, a well-known virtual world."  Notice that I did not capitlize  "virtual world" either.  "Virtual world" in this case is descriptive and not a name, therefore not capilized.  The same rule applies to when it is used at the end of the sentence. 

The same rule can apply to "open sim".  There is no virtual world specifically called "Open Sim" that I am aware of.  Here again, it is a descriptive and therefore capitilizing it is incorrect.

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Open Sim (or OpenSim) is a name and not a description. It's the name of the prgramme that some people use for their virtual worlds. Therefore, capitalising it is correct.

[Casssey]

I was refering to namssab1nad Piers concerning his offending suggestion:
"I may suggest to Casssey that he go back and take a remedial English education course to learn proper punctuation. It will go a long way in his finding and keeping a job when he graduates from college."

You are free to indicate your opinions about commas and syntax errors, but I can't accept that anyone will offend me in any way. You may not remember it, but I have provided my real life name and not a nick name.