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I'm not native speaker and I'm student learning English in Korea.

I saw one sentence that was from a exam but I found it really confusing.

One widely held view is that self-interest underlines all human interactions, that our constant goal is to maximize rewards and minimize costs

putting aside the meaning of the sentence, I can't understand why the author use comma instead of 'and' in this sentence. and I want to know if this is grammatically right or wrong. to put it simply, is it possible(Grammarly right) to use a comma instead of 'and'?

I'm struggling to know this about 3 hours.

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  • The comma separates two different ways of expressing the same idea. The author didn't use and because the part after the comma isn't a second view, it's an explanation of the view already mentioned. Jun 2, 2021 at 15:46
  • The use of the comma instead of the conjunction is really for dramatic effect. The choice lies with the author, who presumably thought that this construction would better convey the intended message. Jun 2, 2021 at 15:47

1 Answer 1

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This not a grammatical issue, but a stylistic one.

It is not that a simple “or” has been omitted. The author is not implying that the two clauses are alternatives. Rather, the author is implying that the two clauses are identical in meaning. It is an apposition.

It is similar to

The capital of South Korea, Seoul, is...

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