Salutations and valedictions | Punctuation | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello, Garans and hello, Paig. Hi, David. Today we're going to be talking about commas in correspondence, and what that means is how to use commas in letter writing.

So, saying hello and saying goodbye, when you start writing a letter or an email to somebody, you use commas. Um, so let me show you an example. If you're writing a letter to someone, you open it with something like this: "Dear Prudence," comma. "I received the plum jam you sent me," and you can see we have this little comma here because what commas do, right, is they separate elements of the sentence from one another.

So, what we're doing here with this comma is we're putting it after the greeting to separate it from the body text. So that's how you begin a letter or an email: with a comma after the, you know, "Dear" part or the "Hello, Prudence," comma part, you know, whatever it is.

But, Paige, how do you use commas toward the end of correspondence, of emails and stuff, right? So, at the end of a letter or an email, you'll use a comma in a sort of similar way to how you use it at the beginning. So, you'll say something like, "With love," comma, "Bruce Ben Bearak."

So, okay, so we can use them at the beginning like this: "Dear Prudence," comma, or we can use it at the end, at the endings of letters. So, this has a technical name. We were discussing this before we started recording.

So, if you open a letter, that's called the salutation, which is another way to say hi, and the way you end a letter is called a valediction, which is like a saying hail. I think "W" in Latin means hail; I think "salute" is hello, and "W" or is goodbye.

And so, this is really just like a helloing and a goodbye saying. So, if you're saying hello in a letter or an email, you use a comma. If you're saying goodbye in a letter or an email, use a comma.

You can learn anything. David out. Paige out.