Restrictive modifiers (or restrictive sentence elements—also known as essential sentence elements) are essential to the full meaning of the word or phrase being modified; they restrict or limit the meaning of that word within the sentence. To indicate that they are essential to the meaning of the noun, they are not separated from it by commas. For example, you might write "My classmate Daphne is a professional skateboarder." Since presumably you have more than one classmate, the modifier "Daphne" specifies which one you are writing about.

Non-restrictive modifiers, on the other hand, provide additional information that is not essential to the core meaning of the word or phrase being modified. (The term "non-essential" is often used in place of "non-restrictive.") As a way of indicating that the information provided by non-restrictive modifiers is incidental rather than essential to the word being modified, non-restrictive modifiers should be set off with commas. For example, you might write that "Daphne Lee, a professional skateboarder, is in my English class."

Again, restrictive (or essential) sentence elements are words or phrases that follow nouns (or noun phrases) and that are essential to their meaning. Essentials do not take commas. Non-restrictive (or non-essential) elements are words or phrases that follow nouns (or noun phrases) and that provide more information about the nouns. Non-essentials take commas before and after them.

 

 1

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence.
 
 
 

 2

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence.
 
 
 

 3

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence.
 
 

 4

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence.
 
 
 

 5

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence.
 
 
 


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