Last week’s column that discussed the use of comas, semi and full colons, and mentioned dependent and independent clauses in passing, elicited an email response from a reader who sought to know what ...

An essential relative clause provides necessary, defining information about the noun. On the other hand, non‐ essential relative clauses provide additional, non‐necessary information about the noun.

1. Relative clauses are “embedded” grammatical structures, contained inside other grammatical structures. 2. Relative clauses play a central role in English discourse. 3. Relative clause knowledge is ...