🔣 All because of a comma. An example of a good mistake with "which. 🔣

I like good mistakes. What's a good mistake? One that's subtle. One that helps us learn. One that gives me material for a post (jk).

I want to share an example of a good mistake.

So, we were doing the following in class: I gave my students the beginning of a sentence from my IELTS essay and asked them to finish it.

Look at the sentence. How would you finish it?

📄 "When young people invest time into shopping, it means they are not investing it into acquiring skills which ... "

📄 A student wrote:
"... which will prevent them from succeeding in their career path in the future."

This is a mistake. Clearly, the student meant "not investing time into acquiring skills will prevent young people from succeeding." But this is not possible. Why? All because of a comma. When we want to define the whole clause before "which," we need a comma.

For example,
- I didn't answer the question, which resulted in a low score. (Not answering resulted in a low, not the question.)
- I always highlight key words in essay topics, which helps me stay focused and nail Task Response. (Highlighting the key words helps, not the essay topics.)

Since we don't have a comma in my original sentence, we need to define skills.

📄 Here my original sentence: "When young people invest time into shopping, it means they are not investing it into acquiring skills which could later become their competitive advantage on the job market and other areas of life."

This concludes this portion of the "comma or no comma after which" grammar topic. Unfortunately, the comma does not always mean you are defining the whole clause before. A which clause with a comma can also define a noun. But this is a whole different story for another time. For today, the moral is "no comma necessarily means that you are defining a noun."

It was a good mistake, wasn't it?