Pledge of Allegiance

"I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

This is gramatically where the commas should go. If you take the comma sections out, the rest of the sentence would still make sense.

RE: chumura 10
I agree with your punctuation... though it differs from the government's where there is a comma after America. Why?

My reasoning would have been "one nation under God" is an appositive renaming "the Republic". Then, "indivisible" and "with liberty and justice for all" equally modify nation and republic. There is a grammar rule that puts a comma between equal adjectives.

The America comma is still my issue.

wat ^ doods? LoL ItZ nOt CoRrEcT 2 PuT A CoMa AfTuR UhMarIcAh cUz ItZ NoT PrOpEr aNd i nO pRoPeR LoL. mAbE iF iT WaZ aN uHpOzItIv bUt iT Iznt LoL. l8r dOoDs, i gOtUh gO ToOtur a DoOd iN SpElLiNg LoL.

Geez
Who is your English teacher?! Just kidding. BTW, if you want extra credit you need to find a real reason. See you Monday.

~Mrs. Miles

I go along with chumura10.

Not to hijack this thread, but how about the Second Amendment:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

It's the last comma I have a problem with; it makes no sense to me to have it there.

Susan, the comma you question, the one after 'America', is there to separate two parallel phrases "the United States of America" and "the Republic for which it stands." Today it is commonplace not to place a comma before the "and" because the conjunction itself takes the place of the punctuation mark. But waaay, way back when I was in school, we were to taught to separate such phrases with commas, sticking them in front of conjunctions where -- I agree -- they shouldn't oughta be. It's really a tossup. Neither construction is grammatically wrong.

I'm English myself, but I think there should be a colon after "stands". I agree with Merry Andrew that the comma after "America" is optional.


This is 18th century punctuation. 200 years ago it was standard practice to separate every clause with a comma. For example, here is a sentence from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."

Conventions have changed since then and if you were writing the sentence about militia today the commas after "militia" and "arms" should both be omitted.