Coordinating Conjunctions

COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS

Coordinating conjunctions may join single words, or they may join groups of words, but they must always join similar elements: e.g. subject+subject, verb phrase+verb phrase, sentence+sentence. The seven coordinating conjunctions in English are:

FOR - is to introduce the reason for the preceding clause

AND - joins two similar ideas together

NOR - The conjunction nor is not extinct, but it is not used nearly as often as the other conjunctions. Its most common use is as the little brother in the correlative pair, neither-nor

BUT - joins two contrasting ideas together

OR - joins two alternative ideas

YET - is very similar to 'but' as it also joins two contrasting ideas together

SO - shows that the second idea is the result of the first

An easy way to remember these six conjunctions is to think of the word FANBOYS. Each of the letters in this somewhat unlikely word is the first letter of one of the coordinating conjunctions.

Among the coordinating conjunctions, the most common, of course, are AND, BUT and OR.