The word because in grammar

Because is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects a subordinate clause to an independent clause; good style dictates that there should be no comma between these two clauses. There should generally be no comma between the two. Michael went to the forest, because he loves walking among the trees.

How do you use the word Which?

Which vs. That: How to Choose

1. In a defining clause, use that.
2. In non-defining clauses, use which.
3. Remember, which is as disposable as a sandwich bag. If you can remove the clause without destroying the meaning of the sentence, the clause is nonessential and you can use which.

How do you use the word so in a sentence?

“She was unhappy, so she left her husband.” “You should wear a jacket, so you don’t catch a cold.” “Tie your shoes, so you don’t trip on your laces.”

When but is used in a sentence?

But can be used in the following ways: As a conjunction (connecting two phrases or clauses): She’s 83 but she still goes swimming every day. As a way of starting a new sentence and connecting it to the previous sentence: It was in Cairo that he met Nadia. But that’s another story.

Can a sentence have two independent clauses?

Sometimes two independent clauses (two simple sentences) can be put together to form another kind of sentence: the compound sentence. They are also called coordinating conjunctions because they join or coordinate two equal clauses.

Can we use but and if together?

If ….. ,but….. because they are both conjunction.

What is but an example of?

This word is commonly categorized under conjunctions because it can connect two clauses together and form a single sentence. In the sample sentence below: She stumbled but didn’t fall. The word “but” links together the clauses “she stumbled” and “didn’t fall,” and is therefore considered as a conjunction.

What does BYT stand for?

Before Your Time

Can we use although and but together in a sentence?

‘Although’ and ‘but’ cannot be used in the same sentence if there are only two clauses/ideas. You could also say ‘Although she is of a rich family, she is but a mere descendant and far from inheriting the wealth’. Here, using ‘although’ and ‘but’ in the same sentence makes sense.

What is a better word than because?

Synonyms for because. ’cause, as, as long as, being (as or as how or that)

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Many people will be somewhat surprised that the American Dialect Society’s «Word of the Year» choice was because in its use with a noun phrase (NP) complement (though the Megan Garber’s Atlantic Monthly article on it nearly two months ago should perhaps have been a tip-off). It seems to be unprecedented for a word in a minor category like preposition to be chosen rather than some emergent or fashionable word in one of the major lexical categories: recent winners have included 2012’s hashtag (noun), 2011’s occupy (verb), 2010’s app (noun), 2009’s tweet (noun and verb), 2008’s bailout (noun), 2007’s subprime (adjective), 2006’s plutoed (past participle of verb meaning «downgrade in status»), and 2005’s truthiness (noun). And it also seems to be unique in representing a new syntactically defined word use within a given category rather than a new (or newly trending) word. The syntax of because calls for a little discussion, I think, given that Megan Garber thinks the word has become a preposition for the first time, and every dictionary on the market is wrong in the part-of-speech information it gives about the word (write to me if you can find a dictionary of which this is not true: I’d love to see one).

What the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) says about because will do as a basis for discussion, since the dictionaries pretty much all agree (they basically just plagiarize each other). There are some that say because is an adverb (Wiktionary does, for example), which is stupid in various ways I won’t go into here, but what the AHD reports is more standard (it agrees completely with Webster’s Third New International Dictionary): it says that because is a «conjunction», but there is also a word spelled because of, which is a preposition. Both claims are flamingly and demonstrably wrong.

Traditional grammar recognizes two types of «conjunction» (I put the word in scare quotes because, although famililar, it is a most undesirable choice of terminology, since it has a different use in logic): there are «subordinating conjunctions» and «coordinating conjunctions». Because doesn’t resemble the archetypal members of either class of words.

Why because isn’t a «conjunction»

First, let’s consider the «subordinating conjunctions» (The Cambridge Grammar calls them subordinators). The archetypal exemplar is the unstressed word that (not the stressed demonstrative with the same spelling). It introduces subordinate clauses, as in Ted says that the world is flat, which are nearly always complements (i.e., they are required or specifically licensed by the foregoing main clause word, in this case believe). That is meaningless in its own right, and often omissible (Ted says the world is flat is grammatical and has the same meaning). Preposing the constituent that it introduces (i.e., shifting that and the following clause to the beginning of the main clause) generally sounds pretty weird: the strikingly odd sentence ??That the world is flat, Ted says would need a special context where different things Ted says are being contrasted with one another. It is not at all just a variant of Ted says that the world is flat.

None of this holds for because, as used in sentences like Ted is ridiculed because he holds ridiculous beliefs. Because introduces constituents that are hardly ever complements. In The reason he left is because he was not respected the because phrase is the complement of is, and in the colloquial Just because he’s a Republican doesn’t mean he’s evil the subject is the phrase beginning just because. But mostly because phrases are adjuncts. Thus *Ted says because the world is flat is not grammatical at all due to the lack of a complement for say (you would have to understand it elliptically, with something missing after the verb says, so it means «Ted says it is because the world is flat»). And of course because is not meaningless: it contributes a crucial logical relation of cause or reason. It can therefore never be omitted without radical change to the meaning and usually the grammatical permissibility of the sentence (*Ted is ridiculed he holds ridiculous beliefs is not grammatical). Moreover, shifting the whole because-phrase to the front is perfectly normal: Because he holds ridiculous beliefs, Ted is ridiculed is perfectly normal in lots of contexts. In short, because is nothing like that in its syntax or its semantics.

What about the other «conjunctions»? The classic «coordinating conjunction» (which CGEL calls a coordinator) is and, which introduces non-initial components of coordinate constituents, as in Roses are red and violets are blue. Switching the positions of the two clauses separated by the and normally gives a grammatical result with the same truth conditions: Violets are blue and roses are red is true if and only if Roses are red and violets are blue is true. Preposing the and plus what follows it is never permitted: *And violets are blue, roses are red is totally ungrammatical.

The opposite of all of this holds for because. The sentence Roses are red because violets are blue has a completely different meaning from Violets are blue because roses are red (the direction of the causal arrow is reversed). And Because violets are blue, roses are red is a grammatical alternative way of expressing the same thing as Roses are red because violets are blue.

So why do all dictionaries make the self-evidently false claim that because is a «conjunction» and thus either like that or like and? In short, because they are all lazy followers of a stupid tradition that has needed rethinking for 200 years (some would say it’s more like 2,000 years, because it originates in classical times). They are locked into system of respecting an ancient analysis that doesn’t work.

The «conjunction» notion is based on the extremely vague notion of joining: a «conjunction» is supposed to be a word that «joins» two elements together. Very little thought is required to see that if using C to «join» A together with B means simply forming the sequence «A C B» then almost anything can be called a «conjunction»; and no stricter and more tightly framed definition has been given. (It couldn’t be, given the diversity of what it would have to cover: subordination of finite and nonfinite complement and adjunct clauses, coordination of clauses, and coordination of other things such as NPs.)

Why because of isn’t a preposition

That brings us to the similarly brainless claim that there is a preposition spelled because of. I’m not going to say that the dictionary should never recognize something as a word if it has a space in it; foreign-derived proper nouns like Santa Cruz are best thought of as words rather than phrases, and there may be some space-containing words other than proper nouns (sort of is probably an example). But because of isn’t one of them.

I don’t need elaborate arguments to convince you of this. I simply searched the Wall Street Journal corpus (44 million words from the late 1980s that has served as a convenient testbed for all sorts of computational linguistic experiments over the past twenty years), looking for cases of because and of with some stuff in between. Within half a second my laptop provided these results:

1. If among the intellectual beliefs of Latin America the idea of democracy itself is so denigrated, it is because, in great part, of our public universities.
2. Higher-priced goods were the best sellers in lines ranging from toys to apparel, partly because, some retailers thought, of the new tax law, which will eliminate deductions for sales taxes beginning next year.
3. Chavez was more restrained this time because, he later revealed, of a rib injury suffered sparring at promoter Don King’s famous, $1,000-a-day Cleveland training lair six weeks ago.
4. «I want to avoid saying Europe is a role model for North America,» says Robert C. Stempel, who won the president’s job at GM last May because, it is widely believed, of the company’s improvement overseas.

These don’t just have words and spaces in between because and of; they actually have commas in there! Do you want to posit words in the dictionary that have commas and spaces and sequences of three or four words inside them? Do you want to propose that the dictionary should include not just the one word because of but several million others like because, some retailers thought, of and because, it is widely believed, of? If you do, you’re a fruitcake, and I’m not addressing you. If you are a Language Log reader you will see what I mean. There is no preposition because of; these are two separate words, with their own functions, capable of being widely separated by other words.

The correct part-of-speech classification

Of, naturally, is a preposition. It is the commonest and most stereotypical of all prepositions in English. It heads preposition phrases (PPs) like of our public universities. So what should we say about because? Contrary to all the dictionaries, it is a preposition. As its complement (the phrase that follows it to complete the PP) it may take either a clause (as in the PP because he holds ridiculous beliefs) or a PP with of as its head (as in the PP because of our public universities). Some prepositions can occur with no complement (as in We went in), some require an NP (as of does) some require a clause (as although does), and some require a PP (like out in those uses that do not involve exiting from delimited regions of space: notice that They did it out of ignorance is grammatical but *They did it out ignorance is not).

The change that has caught the eye of the American Dialect Society is simply that because has picked up the extra privilege already possessed by prepositions like of: it now allows a noun phrase (NP) as complement (with a subtly different shade of meaning: because money seems to express only a rather vague and non-serious commitment to the idea that the reason is financial). So syntactically speaking, in the following table of prepositions (in red) and their complement categories (in blue), a single entry has been changed (✓ means «grammatically permitted», * means «grammatically forbidden», and % means «grammatically permitted in some semantically limited contexts»):

	(none)	NP	of-PP	Clause
in	✓	✓	*	*
out	✓	%	%	*
since	✓	✓	*	✓
of	*	✓	*	*
because	*	*	✓	✓

The language has simply added to its stock of grammatical possibilities (as it can, because syntax) a single check mark, replacing the green asterisk in the last row. Think of it as the first American Dialect Society grammatical Check Mark of the Year. And if you would like the dictionary to cover (as Wiktionary does) the colloquial use of because on its own as an imperious but uninformative answer to a why-question («Why do I have to wear my mittens, mommy?» «Because!«), then we can get rid of the first asterisk in the last row as well, and the relevant line will look like this:

	(none)	NP	of-PP	Clause
because	✓	✓	✓	✓

That represents because as a preposition that is sometimes used with no complement, and sometimes (in the new usage that the ADS has just recognized) with an NP complement, and also (much more commonly) with an of-PP complement or a bare finite clause complement. It’s a syntactically accurate classification, which dictionaries ought to adopt—but don’t hold your breath waiting for them.

[This post was revised on Monday 6 January 2014 and again on 16 July 2014; several small errors were corrected and a few additional points were added. For a more thorough treatment of the topic of classifying words like because, see my paper «Lexical categorization in English dictionaries and traditional grammars», in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 57 (3), 255–273 (2009); uncorrected final proof PDF here. —GKP]

January 5, 2014 @ 1:05 pm
· Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under prepositions, Syntax, Words words words

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If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins of because as a standalone preposition. This helpful passage from Whitman sets out the context:

In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing.

The new usage – older than 3–4 years, mind – is what Laura Bailey and Mark Liberman, respectively, have referred to as “because+noun” and “because NOUN”. Liberman says the idiom usually seems to imply “that the referenced line of reasoning is weak”. Sometimes, yes, but it’s also commonly used just for convenience, or effect: No work tomorrow because holidays!; Of course evolution is true, because science.

Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone. Because time-strapped. Maybe the causal factor is so obvious as to need no elaboration, or the speaker is distracted or giddy, or online and eager to save effort and move on, or maybe the construction appeals for undefined aesthetic or social reasons.

Gretchen McCulloch, at All Things Linguistic, points out that there seem to be restrictions on what kind of noun phrases can occur here. Providing examples of what works and doesn’t work for her (e.g., Yes to: I can’t come out tonight because homework/essays; No to: I can’t come out tonight because lots of homework/this essay), she concludes:

it seems like the because+noun construction really must consist of a bare noun, not a noun with a determiner or an adjective. However, I think I might be able to be okay with:

? I can never get to bed at a reasonable hour because interesting people on the internet!

With new usages, as with old ones, what works or doesn’t varies from person to person. Bare nouns certainly seem more common in the X slot, and tend to carry more emphasis, but I’ve seen longer noun phrases, and other classes of words, used too; there are examples below.

The construction is more versatile than “because+noun” suggests. This because can be yoked to verbs (Can’t talk now because cooking), adjectives (making up examples because lazy), interjections (Because yay!), and maybe adverbs too, though in strings like Because honestly., the adverb is functioning more as an exclamation. The resulting phrases are all similarly succinct and expressive.

Here are some examples from Twitter, categorised by grammatical class:

Nouns, noun phrases, proper nouns:

(Feels in the last tweet is a popular slang abbreviation of feelings, especially in the sense of strong or overwhelming emotion.)

Verbs:

Adjectives:

Interjections:

*

On Language Log I left a comment (before I’d checked) suggesting the usage could’ve come from the “because race car” meme of 2011. But corpus searches show examples from years before that. GloWbE has loads, with many of the noun phrases recurring – science, math, people, art, reasons, comedy, bacon, ineptitude, fun, patriarchy, politics, school, intersectionality, and winner all show up at least twice in the X slot.

Scanning COHA and COCA for similar constructions, I found examples from ABC’s This Week, 2012: “I’m supporting the Patriots because Patriots.”; CNN’s Larry King Show, 2001: “And of course, that was last thing in the world she would do because publicity.” (though the omission of a definite article makes me wonder if it was poorly transcribed); and NBC’s Dateline, 2005:

I definitely kind of viewed him as a suspect.

Why?

Well, because motive.

Fox News Sunday, 15 years ago, has: “And Primary Colors I think has hit the country like a dud, because behavior. It’s not inspiring.” But I’m not sure: it may be more like “because behaviour, it’s not inspiring”, where the noun is fronted and the grammar, though loose, doesn’t use the prepositional because we’re looking at. Ditto this from Ebony, 2007: “People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes. It is one of the more underlisted causes of death…”

Written examples of prepositional because aren’t rare, but they’re pretty much unheard of in edited text, except where it’s reported speech. COCA offers the following, from the Roeper Review, 1996: “But motivation alone does not assure success: ‘Because circumstances. I was just lucky, really…’”

There’s also an old and standard construction that’s superficially very similar to prepositional because. The last time I remember seeing it was in Final Cut, Steven Bach’s book on the making of Heaven’s Gate:

It was pointed out that there seemed to be plenty of time for endless reexamination of footage or for monomaniacal reworking of technical processes, but those all were justified in the name of Art, while seeing how the picture played before an audience was both pointless, because Cimino knew how it would play, and ignoble because a question of mere Commerce.

It’s different, though, because elliptical. Bach’s “ignoble because a question…” is a grammatical elision of “ignoble because it was a question…”. Our non-standard idiom, by contrast, isn’t eliding particular words – it’s substituting for a whole, possibly vague, train of thought, and could take the form “because Commerce(!)”. Bach’s couldn’t.

[Analogous examples: “Professor Einstein holds that perception is generally false because relative.” (Time magazine, 1929). “The will to avoid industrial evils was effective, because sincere.” (Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men). “One way of building up the suspense is for your protagonist to become increasingly unnerved, because increasingly aware that something out of the ordinary is going on.” (Sarah LeFanu, Writing Fantasy Fiction.) “Words that were admitted sparingly because unlimited in number or very numerous.” (Robert Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language).]

But back to novel because X. Where did it come from? No one is quite sure. Neal Whitman agrees with Language Log commenters who think it could be from “Because hey”–type sentences (If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, free lemons), where hey functions “like an adaptor, letting you shift from the ordinary speech register to this casual and condensed register”. And then people started dropping the hey.

It’s not always hey, either: take this line from the linguistically trend-setting Buffy, season 5 (January 2001): “I don’t even get how we made that guy, because, wow, advanced!” There may also be forerunners in child–parent exchanges like “Why? That’s the why” and “Why? Because.”; and in the popular insults “Because shut up” and “Because fuck you, that’s why.”

However it arose, it seems to be spreading. Language loves economy, and the sheer efficiency of this use of because is likely boosting its popularity. Similar constructions are occurring with but, also, so, thus and similar words – see the frame from xkcd, above. And in the Language Log thread (which is worth reading in full), Rod Johnson says a friend “ended a litany of miscellaneous complaints with ‘In conclusion, STUFF.’” All these syntactic compressions may be reinforcing each other.

I’ve used the construction myself, though not often. On Twitter a year ago I was asked if there’s a “male equivalent of feminist”, and because of the medium’s spatial limitations (and because I was impulsively drawn to the unorthodox syntax) I said: “No precise equivalent, because patriarchy, but ‘masculist’/’masculinist’ is closest. Interpretations of it vary a lot.”

Is prepositional-because grammatical? Sure. Not in Standard English, of course. But lots of people are using it in a systematic and semantically transparent way. It has obvious appeal in a range of informal contexts, though whether it manages ultimately to insinuate itself into more formally acceptable usage remains to be seen.

You needn’t use or like this usage of because, and you might even find it annoying, but there’s nothing linguistically problematic about it. Because grammar weirds, because language.

*

Updates:

Following up on this post, Megan Garber at the Atlantic (“English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet”) describes the construction as “exceptionally bloggy and aggressively casual and implicitly ironic. And also highly adaptable.” She notes the significant role of the internet in its development and dissemination, and speculates on its origins.

Gretchen McCulloch has also returned to it at All Things Linguistic (“Where ‘because noun’ probably came from”), delving further into the grammaticality of different forms of because X and suggesting a different origin story from the because-hey hypothesis.

There’s more coverage at Neatorama, Daily Dot, CBS News, Boing Boing, and the Russian site Lenta.ru. Coverage elsewhere (Business Insider, Mashable et al.) mostly repeats the Atlantic story, but I’ll add useful links here as they happen.)

My post’s title may be a bit misleading, and I regret that. I wanted it to include the because X construction, but I ended up sounding too emphatic: because‘s prepositional nature here is not certain. CGEL apparently considers it one even in its traditional roles, but other language commentators disagree. See the comments for discussion.

On Twitter, Jonathan Lipps offers the example “Unfortunately, [noun phrase]”, and suggests that it’s not so much about because changing as it is the generalisation of “[noun-phrase]-as-elided-clause”.

Joining the preposition camp is Joe at Mr. Verb, who  notes that because originates as a prepositional phrase (by cause), and finds the new usage “has a pretty classic distribution of a preposition […] and the semantics are not weird for a preposition”. He also raises interesting questions from the point of view of historical linguistics.

Cognitive psychologist Jessica Love has a fascinating post at the American Scholar on the appeal of ungrammatical trends and memes, including “because X”, lolspeak, doge, etc. She writes:

Many of us—especially younger generations—seem to take special pleasure in wordplay that upends standard grammatical conventions. But why? According to one psychological theory, humor is fundamentally about detecting something that violates our expectations, but in a nonthreatening way. . . . Given grammar’s relatively low stakes, then, it is fodder for immediate humor.

I left a comment on Jessica’s post, and hope to revisit the subject here before long.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan briefly covers the discussion at The Dish: Because Linguistics.

Update season 2:

The American Dialect Society has named because its 2013 Word of the Year (I called it in December) prompting renewed discussion of the word’s precise grammatical role in the because X construction. A very helpful post at All Things Linguistic makes a persuasive case that this novel because “isn’t a preposition (but is actually cooler)“.

At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum takes polite but firm issue with McCulloch’s interpretation, in a post on the promiscuity of prepositions: “the mistake of trusting a standard dictionary definition of ‘preposition’ has misled All Things Linguistic (and even Stan Carey to some extent), just like it misleads everyone else.”

Linguist Neal Whitman revisits the grammar of because in both its new and traditional uses, at Visual Thesaurus: “So yes, because is a preposition, but not on account of this new usage. But there’s still the question of exactly what kind of complement this particular prepositional flavor of because takes.”

Tyler Schnoebelen at the Idibon blog has done some serious number-crunching on this, analysing twenty-something thousand tweets for patterns of because X (the top X? Yolo). For stats, laughs, and useful academic links, read his post ‘Innovating because innovation.’

The blog materfamilias reads has drawn my attention to a use of because X from way back in 1949, in Nancy Mitford’s book Love in a Cold Climate: ‘I hadn’t a bit expected that he would come to London for it because for one thing, knee-breeches.’

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You should not add a comma before «because» in English if the meaning of the sentence is clear (not ambiguous).

When using «because» in mid-sentence, the comma is unnecessary if the meaning of the sentence is clear (not ambiguous).

Mary went to Chicago because her mother was sick.

If «because» comes at the beginning of a sentence, add a comma after the first clause (introduced by «because«).

Because her mother was sick, Mary went to Chicago.

Because her mother was sick Mary went to Chicago.

Contents

• 1. ‘Because’ in Mid-Sentence
• 2. Use a Comma to Clarify
• 3. Starting a Sentence With ‘Because’
• 4. Conclusion
• 5. References

1. ‘Because’ in Mid-Sentence

We do not typically use a comma before «because» in mid-sentence. Why?

A clause is a part of a sentence that contains a subject and a verb. For example:

John went to the restaurant because he was hungry.

This sentence has two clauses:

• «John went to the restaurant» is the independent clause. It is the main part of the sentence; it expresses a complete thought and can stand alone.
• «Because he was hungry» is the dependent clause. It is added to the independent clause and cannot stand alone as a sentence.

As a subordinating conjunction, «because» joins an independent clause («John went to the restaurant» in the example above) and a dependent clause («because he was hungry»). Placing a comma between an independent clause and a dependent clause is not grammatically correct in English.⁽¹⁾

My sister went to Spain because she loves Spanish food.

My sister went to Spain, because she loves Spanish food.

Be also aware that if both clauses have the same subject, you should repeat the subject after because.

More examples

• I study English because I want to work in the United States.
• I came back because I had forgotten my sunglasses.
• Green tea is good for your health because it is high in antioxidant polyphenols.
• My wife is planning to go to Africa because she wants to climb Kilimanjaro and embark on a safari tour.
• I had to go outside because I needed fresh air.

2. Use a Comma to Clarify

There is an exception, however, to this practice of not using a comma before «because«. Occasionally, a negative sentence with because can have two possible meanings. Only in this case, use a comma to clarify.

Examine this sentence:

Mary didn’t go to Chicago because her mother was sick.

Without further contextual information, it is not clear whether:

• Mary didn’t go to Chicago (because she had to stay with her sick mother); or
• Mary actually went to Chicago, but for a complete different reason.

To clarify that Mary didn’t go to Chicago, insert a comma before because:

Mary didn’t go to Chicago, because her mother was sick.

Omit a comma before because if you mean the opposite. For example:

Rebecca didn’t buy the T-shirt because it was cheap; she bought it because its style looked good on her.

Rebecca didn’t buy the T-shirt, because it was cheap; she bought it because its style looked good on her.

The second version is incorrect because she actually bought the T-shirt.

More examples

• My brother didn’t go to the party, because he had to deal with too much work.
• I didn’t invest in gold, because it seemed too expensive.
• She couldn’t write the essay, because her computer suddenly stopped working.

The following negative sentences should not include a comma before «because«:

• My brother didn’t go to the dentist because he was experiencing tooth pain. He went because he was having persistent bad breath.
• Olivia is not reading the book because it is interesting; she is reading it because she was bored.
• John does not exercise because he wants to lose weight; he does it to improve his health.

3. Starting a Sentence With ‘Because’

It is common and perfectly acceptable for «because» to start a sentence, as in:

Because it was raining, we canceled the barbecue.

As mentioned above, we do not commonly put a comma in front of «because» in mid-sentence. However, when starting a sentence with a dependent clause (e.g., starting a sentence with «because«), add a comma after the first clause.⁽¹⁾

Because you are too irritated, slow down and focus on your breathing.

Because you are too irritated slow down and focus on your breathing.

More examples

• Because it is November, the temperature is getting cooler.
• Because everything seemed so confusing, I didn’t know what to say.
• Because he wanted to feel healthier and save money, my uncle quit smoking.
• Because I was feeling down, I had to go outside.
• Because inflation is surging, buy the car you need before prices rise.

4. Conclusion

These guidelines will help you decide whether to use commas with because in a sentence:

1. Do not put a comma before «because» if your sentence is clear (there is no ambiguity).
2. Consider adding a comma before «because» to clarify a negative sentence with two possible meanings.
3. Remember to place a comma after the first clause of a sentence starting with «because«.

5. References

(1) Kaufman, Lester; Straus, Jane. The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. Chapter 2 (punctuation).