Main content
Course: Grammar > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Commas in space and timeSalutations and valedictions
David and Paige, KA’s resident grammarians, talk about how to address and sign off on letters using commas!
Want to join the conversation?
- What is meant by a Valedictory session?(10 votes)
- "Salutations" is a fancy way of saying, "greetings".
"Valediction" is a fancy way of saying, "goodbyes".(32 votes)
- what is a valediction(5 votes)
- "vale--" valued
"diction" saying.
A valediction is a way of ending a communication by saying something respectful to the person who has listened to you or read what you've written.(16 votes)
- why is Paige now with David I remember not her being in the video(6 votes)
- David Rheinstrom started making these videos in 2014.
Paige joined the team during the summer of 2016. David trained her for 3 months in how to make videos and teach online. They made many videos together that summer.
At the end of the summer of 2016, Paige returned to the University of California.
All the videos you watch here were made before the end of 2016.
You're watching old stuff.(10 votes)
- Why are we doing Khan Academy(5 votes)
- I find it intersting and instructive. How about you?(8 votes)
- Do you now what ninjago is David ?(5 votes)
- Jump back kick back wip around and spin(6 votes)
- I am pretty sure that the English word "salutation" (or salute for short, which is usually used a sign of greeting in the army), comes from the French word "salut", meaning hi.(4 votes)
- More deeply than that, "salut" comes from a Latin root which is also found in "health". When we offer a salutation, we are asking about someone's health.(7 votes)
- What uses are there with commas?(2 votes)
- Commas are really useful punctuation in English! At its most basic, the comma separates parts of a sentence. It can separate elements of a list, be used in an introduction (for example, "First, put the cake in the oven"), and for starting and ending letters. Here's the introduction video to the comma with more information: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/grammar/punctuation/the-comma/v/meet-the-comma-the-comma-punctuation-khan-academy(6 votes)
- hi david how are you doing today(4 votes)
- Who is Bruce Ben-Bacharach?(3 votes)
- This is a made-up name for the purpose of teaching you something about how to use commas.
Often, when you see a hyphenated name with "Ben-" somewhere in it, it is derived from the Hebrew language, where "ben_" means "Son of". You can see the parallel in Arabic names that have "Bin" in the middle, or Irish ones with "Fitz_" somewhere like that.(2 votes)
- This is hard it makes no sense(1 vote)
- Many things in life are hard, and they make sense at the same time. I encourage you to listen to this one a couple more times. You can get it!(6 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello
grammarians and hello Paige. - Hi David. - Today we're gonna 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 letter
or an e-mail to somebody, you use commas so let
me show you an example. So 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. You can see we have this little comma here because what commas do,
right, is that 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? - Great, 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-Bacharach - So okay, we can use them
at the beginning like this. Dear Prudence comma or we can use it at the end. 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 saying hail, I think
wale in latin means hail. I think salu is hello and wale, or vale is goodbye and so this is really just like a helloining 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 email... - Use a comma. - You can learn anything. David out. - Paige out.