When you write your essay, you’ll have to tell readers about the credentials of experts you quote, paraphrase, and summarize. Instead of providing this information in separate sentences, you can use an appositive to embed this information smoothly and clearly into another sentence.
An appositive is a noun or pronoun that, along with modifiers, gives more information about another noun or pronoun. Here are a couple of examples from the reading selections earlier in the chapter:
Noun
Appositive
“Love is a natural high,” observes Anthony Walsh, author of The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body. (Toufexis, par. 10)
By placing the credentials right after the expert’s name, these sentences provide readers with the information they need, exactly where they need it.
Appositives can also be used for many different purposes, as these examples suggest:
| TO DEFINE A KEY TERM | Each person carries in his or her mind a unique subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a “love map.” (Toufexis, par. 17) |
| TO IDENTIFY PEOPLE AND THINGS | Competitors playing a match against Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, often came down with a mysterious affliction known as “Fischer-fear.” (Lehrer, par. 1) |
| TO GIVE EXAMPLES | Despite the risk of serious side effects—nausea, loss of sex drive, seizures—drugs like Zoloft can be a godsend for this group. (Cain, par. 3) |
Notice that the last example uses dashes instead of commas to set off the appositive from the rest of the sentence. Although commas are more common, dashes are often used if the writer wants to give the appositive more emphasis or if the appositive itself contains commas, as in the last example above.