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.

More than four years ago, I replied to this tough grammar question by a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum: “Do noun clauses grammatically functioning as subjects in a sentence follow the sequence ...