Groundhog Day Lesson 1
1A Essay 3 (Essay Worth 200 Points): Can a Genius Redirect His Passions Toward Moral and Professional Excellence?
Due as an upload on May 11.
The Assignment:
From Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked and the movie Groundhog Day, compare the purgatory (pain and suffering as a form of spiritual cleansing and growth) and redemption in Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors.
In this comparison, you are analyzing the following similarities between Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors:
- Both are beset by the false promise that hedonism and pleasure bring happiness, and this false promise chains them to a lower, more corrupt version of their being that slogs through a miserable existence even as they try to tell themselves the opposite.
- Both hit rock bottom from their failed hedonism and are tempted by the great philosophical force of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no purpose or sense to life, and that despair is the only reasonable response to a world that is so absurdly lacking in meaning, harmony, and a moral order.
- Both undergo a reformation of the soul by developing, as Cal Newport calls it, a Craftsman Mindset, toiling at their craft, developing mastery over their craft bit by bit, and accomplishing a maturity of mind and soul that results in producing beautiful art--gourmet cuisine in the case of Jeff Henderson; piano music in the case of Phil Connors.
- Both find the transformation of their soul is accompanied by excruciating and prolonged suffering, a tribulation that could be described as Purgatory.
- Both find that their personality transformation bears fruit: They produce great art, they develop character, maturity, humility, and the capacity to love others; and they are unrecognizable from the wretched person they were at the beginning of their journey.
- Both bear witness to Viktor Frankl’s famous adage from Man’s Search for Meaning that the search for happiness will alway fail and therefore the search for happiness must be abandoned; rather, we must search for a higher purpose and moral goodness, and only then will happiness become the natural byproduct of our purposeful, moral life.
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
- Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
- Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
- Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Recommended Sources for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Leah Schnelbach’s “Groundhog Day Succeeds by Breaking the Rules of Every Genre”
- Tracey Moore’s “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned Through Groundhog Day”
- Ryan Gilbey’s “Groundhog Day: the perfect comedy, forever”
- James Parker’s “Reliving Groundhog Day”
- Tristin Hopper’s “10,000 years? Here’s how long Phil Connors was trapped in Groundhog Day”
- Simon Gallagher’s “Film Theory: Groundhog Day is HELL And Ned Ryerson Is The Devil”
- YouTube video: “Top 10 Reasons Why the Movie ‘Groundhog Day’ is Actually Set in Purgatory”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day lasts HOW LONG for Bill Murray?”
- YouTube video: “How Phil Connors Really Escaped Groundhog Day”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day Movie Meaning”
- YouTube video: “Hidden Meaning of Groundhog Day”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day analysis: A Lesson in Happiness”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day--An Inescapable Premise”
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Phil Connors as Misfit
Phil Connors has become a misfit, which means in part that he is disconnected from the normal social-moral connection that gives us meaning, causes us to act with decency and respect toward others, and causes us to act in moral ways that reinforce our belonging to the community.
Phil Connors as Solipsist or Egotist
An egotist is someone who is imprisoned by the petulant demands of his ego. In the extreme, egotism becomes its most virulent form--solipsism--in which the subject withdraws and becomes so disconnected from reality that he lives only inside his head. He becomes the only reality. Other human beings don’t exist as fully human beings; rather, they exist as phantom annoyances and inconveniences. Thus, the solipsist is only interested in others as far as they can make his life more pleasing, but usually, he is antisocial and finds human beings predictable and repulsive.
The Demands of Solipsism
To be a solipsist or an egotist is a full-time job. As such, it is very demanding and draining. The subject exists in a “high-stress, low-reward” state and this condition makes him constantly rude, irritable, and cranky. He not only becomes unbearable to others but to himself.
Repetition and Monotony
Unable to savor anything from life and living in the deathly, isolating imprisonment of solipsism, an egotist such as Phil Connors finds that every day is the same, a rut, a fetid routine, an excruciating chore. Just getting through the day and waking up to another is a monotonous hell.
Connors’ Hellish Condition Is Dynamic, Not Static
Someone in a state of solipsism does not twist and squirm in stagnant agony. On the contrary, the agony compounds with time, and the subject exists in a simmering rage, ready to lash out at people at the slightest provocation.
Anomie and Rudeness
When people become narcissists, wrapped up in their own egos, they have a lack of social norms. When a society has enough of such people, that is a failed society that cultivates narcissists and solipsists suffers from a condition of chaos. This type of chaos has a term: anomie. It is a form of being crass, crude, and rude, and it becomes a social contagion. The more people who behave rudely, the more people who embrace rudeness. Over time, rude behavior becomes normalized.
This type of anomie has become common during the Pandemic as analyzed in Olga Khazan’s essay “Why People Are Acting So Weird.”
Excerpt
Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral asshole-on-a-plane video that week.
In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this goddamn town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of shit” and storming off.
During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.
Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” Chalkbeat reported last fall. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.
What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms recently walked me through a few possible explanations.
We’re all stressed out
One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge by an innocuous request.
“When someone has that angry feeling, it’s because of a combination of some sort of provocation, their mood at the time of that provocation, and then how they interpret that provocation,” said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies anger. Not only are people encountering more “provocations”—staffing shortages, mask mandates—but also their mood is worse when provoked. “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now,” he added.
Rudeness can be contagious. Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients—even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
People are drinking more
People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs, and “a lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance,” Humphreys said. “Whether they’re drinking before they get on the flight … A lot of auto accidents, including aggression-driven auto accidents, come from substances.”
Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019. Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID.
Americans have also been buying more guns, which may help explain the uptick in the murder rate. Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019—a short “time to crime” window that suggests criminal intent. “Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,” Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.
We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us
The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”
The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too.
“We’ve got, I think, a generalized sense that the rules simply don’t apply,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told me. In some places, he says, police arrested fewer people during the pandemic, and “when enforcement goes down, people tend to relax their commitment to the rules.”
Though it’s been a lifesaving tool throughout the pandemic, mask wearing has likely made this problem worse. Just as it’s easier to scream at someone on Twitter than in real life, it’s easier to rage at a masked flight attendant than one whose face you can fully see. “You don’t really see a human being so much as you’re seeing someone masked,” Sampson said. Though one study found that face masks don’t dehumanize the wearer, another small experiment found that they do impair people’s ability to detect emotions.
Some of the antisocial behavior Americans are seeing will resolve itself as the pandemic loosens its grip. In most of the country, masks are coming off, people are resuming normal gatherings, and kids have returned to school. The rules and rhythms that kept America running smoothly are settling back into place.
Improvement may be slow. But experts think human interaction will, eventually, return to the pre-pandemic status quo. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed. “There have been periods where the entire nation is challenged,” Insel said, “and you see both things: people who do heroic things, and people who do some very defensive, protective, and oftentimes ridiculous things.”
***
Phil Connors must recover from his condition of anomie and solipsism.
Leah Schnelbach’s “Groundhog Day Succeeds by Breaking the Rules of Every Genre”
Excerpt (subtitles my own)
Death Challenges Phil’s Egotism
When he learns that the old man died, and is told by the nurse that “it was just his time,” he refuses to accept it and embarks on a new montage—this time trying to hold death off with money, food, warmth, anything he can think of, in a touching parody of the excess of the earlier diner scene, and his own parade of suicides.
Of course none of it works. Phil wants to control life itself, and become the god he claimed to be, but in the end, he’s left in an alley, holding Pops while he dies, and is left to stare into an empty sky, watching Pops’ last breath drift away.
In all of these scenes Pops never changes, never has any lines, no personality of his own, because he is Death. He is the reality of time, and finiteness, that Phil has to accept before he can return to life. It is only after the final death that we see Phil really shift in his attitude toward life, and even winter. Earlier he intones, “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life,” but now he delivers a truly inspiring speech for Groundhog Day. “Standing here, among the people of Punxatawney, and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”
Humility Causes Us to Reach Out to Others and Dissolve Our Solipsism
We see that Phil has changed by how he spends his day helping the people of Punxatawney. He can’t save Pops, but he can make his last day a little warmer. He can make sure the kid doesn’t break his neck falling out of the tree, that Buster the Groundhog Poo-bah lives to see February 3rd, and that a young Michael Shannon can attend Wrestlemania with his new bride. Winter itself is transformed, because he’s learned to look at it differently, and Phil has become a new person.
In the end, we have a romantic comedy that’s not about whether the boy gets the girl. We have a spiritual movie that never tells us why the hero gains his redemption. We have a vision of small-town America that makes us want to flee back to the loving arms of urban Pittsburgh. (OK, that might just be me…while I’ve come to love the people of Punxsutawney, I don’t think I could handle living there.) We have a time loops movie that doesn’t give us a single clue about its structure. And finally, we have a comedy that hinges on death, but remains so fucking wonderful that people are willing to suffer through multiple exposure to “I Got You Babe” to watch it every year.
***
Nihilism and Anomie Give Way to Caritas
Tracey Moore’s “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned Through Groundhog Day”
Excerpts
A Consequence-Free Life Would Eventually Become Boring
When Phil first realizes he's living the same day over and over again, he takes advantage of it. He steals, he lies to get laid, he's lawless. And it gets boring! Eventually he realizes manipulating people to get exactly what you want all the time isn't that satisfying, and begins to help them instead.
People Make People Better
It isn't money or stuff or careers or fame or superiority that makes you a better person, it's giving yourself to something bigger or other than yourself — a person, a cause, an endeavor. Other people make you better! That's what people are for!
***
Solipsism Becomes a Form of Hell or Purgatory
Simon Gallagher’s “Film Theory: Groundhog Day is HELL And Ned Ryerson Is The Devil”
Excerpt:
There's been considerable talk about the idea that Phil is actually dead - having perished in the snowstorm that is then perpetually wrapped around Punxsutawney while his time-loop torment traps him. That's why he's unable to kill himself and why he's destined to live the same day over and over again: he's literally trapped in purgatory as his soul has been identified as not wholly bad but he cannot move on to Heaven until he proves his worthiness.
That school of thought basically suggests that all of the challenges that Phil overcomes by the end of the film are trials within purgatory that challenge him to make the most morally wholesome choices in the war for his soul. Either he's already fully dead at this point or he's dying, repeating his final day over and over in his head until he comes to the right resolution that helps him move on when he's ready to die properly.
But what if it's all a little darker than that? What if the Punxsutawney that Phil constructs in his mind isn't Purgatory but rather full-blooded, burn-your-briskets Hell?
Think about it: when we meet Phil, he's not a nice person. He's self-centred, arrogant, conceited and manipulative. He's not the kind of person who would be going to Heaven, in other words and it would take a SERIOUS attitude adjustment for him to even get to Purgatory. His morality is just that black and white and his idea of Hell is having to care about other people. To truly care, that is.
What worse a Hell could there be for someone so self-involved than being forced to help an entire town full of people? And worse than that, it's a Hell that promises him the ability to help and improve himself without ever letting him realise his moment of epiphany and move on. He can get kids WrestleMania tickets and fix people's backs, but he can't stop an old man from dying, no matter how hard he tries.
And on the surface, it might seem that that is because Phil initially uses the opportunity for self-improvement for the wrong reasons: he does it primarily to impress Rita in order to seduce her. Sure, there's probably an element of boredom that drives some of his behaviour (like learning to flick cards into a hat to expert level), but he's mostly focused on her as his goal until the very end when he is finally rewarded after a day of pure selflessness.
For most people, that would appear to be his defining arc and it's that that allows him to move on. But there might be something more to it. And to pick that apart, you have to consider two things: firstly, why Phil is trapped as he is in the first place and secondly what SPECIFICALLY gets him freed. It's simple enough to say that he's trapped because he's a bad person, but that wouldn't explain the supernatural element of it all and he's hardly the worst person in the world.
More likely is the suggestion that he's trapped in Punxsutawney as a punishment for something he does while he's there. Someone he interacts with who might have that sort of hellish power. How about the devil?
According to one theory that was originally posted on Reddit, he's there under the control of the devil, who we actually meet early on in Groundhog Day. You'd be forgiven for missing him too, because he doesn't come wearing red or bearing horns and a forked tail: instead he's a businessman in a suit selling life insurance.
That's right, Groundhog Day's Devil is, in fact, Ned Ryerson. Needle Nose Ned.
The theory suggests that Phil is trapped in Punxsutawney because he insults Ned and turns down his offer of a contract for life insurance. Or is that a contract for his soul? It's from the point of their first meeting that everything goes wrong for Phil. Literally, the first step he takes after their meeting is a "doozy" that sees him step into an icy puddle, and it's all downhill from there.
Curiously, Phil doesn't even recognise him, almost as if Ned doesn't actually know him and is operating under some pretence in order to get close to Phil. Almost like the Devil saw an opportunity to take a soul personally from someone he KNEW would be in Punxsutawney at that time and who he could probably have some fun with. Someone, mostly, who deserved to be tormented.
That would explain why it takes so long for Phil to "escape" Punxsutawney in the end. By the time he completes his "perfect day" there's no saying how many times he's tried to live purely selflessly (he does tell the kid who falls out of the tree he's saved him a LOT of times without a hint of gratitude), but you'd have to imagine it's a significant amount of time. There are lots of elements after all, but in the end only one matters.
It's not until Phil finally relents to Ned and signs away his soul to him that he's able to move on. That's the key to the ending, not saving anyone or any act of kindness. It's that transaction. Ned was always selling a contract that covered more than life insurance - he was bartering for Phil's soul, driving him to desperation through endless torment. That torment took two forms: first, making him miserable and then making him HAVE to be selfless - which was everything he hated up until his first meeting with Ned. By the end, he's lost sight of who he was and Ned/The Devil is able to absolutely fleece him out of extensive, unnecessary insurance.
Is this him selling his soul to the Devil for his freedom and everything he wants? After all, he wants to be loved by everyone, he wants to be famous, he wants to never suffer the torment of Punxsutawney ever again (which he achieves by learning to love it) and he gets the girl. Doesn't that all sound a little ideal?
So maybe the ending doesn't see Phil completely freed after all. Maybe him being freed from the loop is simply the end of his life as the Devil takes his soul and what we imagine is a happy ending is something far more profoundly sad. After all, just as George Bailey's "revelation" in It's A Wonderful Life isn't about escaping his hell, but rather embracing it, Phil's "happy ending" is simply to come to love everything that he hated and arguably abandoning everything that had made him successful. Doesn't that sound like Hell?
YouTube video: “Top 10 Reasons Why the Movie ‘Groundhog Day’ is Actually Set in Purgatory”
YouTube video: “Groundhog Day lasts HOW LONG for Bill Murray?”
YouTube video: “How Phil Connors Really Escaped Groundhog Day”
YouTube video: “Groundhog Day Movie Meaning”
- YouTube video: “Hidden Meaning of Groundhog Day”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day analysis: A Lesson in Happiness”
- YouTube video: “Groundhog Day--An Inescapable Premise”
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
The Assignment:
From Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked and the movie Groundhog Day, compare the purgatory (pain and suffering as a form of spiritual cleansing and growth) and redemption in Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors.
In this comparison, you are analyzing the following similarities between Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors:
- Both are beset by the false promise that hedonism and pleasure bring happiness, and this false promise chains them to a lower, more corrupt version of their being that slogs through a miserable existence even as they try to tell themselves the opposite. The quest for hedonism does not create a hedonic response. On the contrary, it creates an anhedonic response or anhedonia.
- Both hit rock bottom from their failed hedonism and are tempted by the great philosophical force of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no purpose or sense to life, and that despair is the only reasonable response to a world that is so absurdly lacking in meaning, harmony, and moral order.
- Both undergo a reformation of the soul by developing, as Cal Newport calls it, a Craftsman Mindset, toiling at their craft, developing mastery over their craft bit by bit, and accomplishing a maturity of mind and soul that results in producing beautiful art--gourmet cuisine in the case of Jeff Henderson; piano music in the case of Phil Connors.
- Both find the transformation of their soul is accompanied by excruciating and prolonged suffering, a tribulation that could be described as Purgatory.
- Both find that their personality transformation bears fruit: They produce great art, they develop character, maturity, humility, and the capacity to love others; and they are unrecognizable from the wretched person they were at the beginning of their journey.
- Both bear witness to Viktor Frankl’s famous adage from Man’s Search for Meaning that the search for happiness will alway fail and therefore the search for happiness must be abandoned; rather, we must search for a higher purpose and moral goodness, and only then will happiness become the natural byproduct of our purposeful, moral life.
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
- Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
- Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
- Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Themes to Address in This Comparison
One. Living in the self or the ego leads to solipsism, a prison, and a form of hell where one’s delusions and self-destructive tendencies exist in a state of recalcitrance.
Two. The quest for hedonism puts people on the hedonic treadmill, a state of addiction, which leads to anhedonia, zombie-brain, and nihilism.
Three. We have to toil in life, embrace a work ethic or Cal Newport’s Craftsman Mindset, not in the service of making money so much as in the service of finding meaning, connection, and belonging.
Four. The search for happiness leads to unhappiness. Real happiness is the natural byproduct of a fulfilled and meaningful life. See Viktor Frankl, Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote, Four Thousand Weeks), and Scott Barry Kaufman (Transcend).
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
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