Therefore | How To Use Therefore Correctly

The word therefore is not a conjunction, and therefore you cannot use it to connect two clauses.

Read the sentence given below. It is an example of the incorrect use of therefore.

• He is clever therefore he gets good marks.

As you can see, therefore is incorrectly used as a conjunction in the above sentence. We can correct this mistake in several different ways. For example, we can split the sentence into two clauses.

• He is clever. Therefore, he gets good marks.

Note that when therefore comes at the beginning of a sentence, we use a comma to separate it from the rest of the sentence.

Instead of a full stop, we can use a semicolon.

• He is clever; therefore, he gets good marks.

We can also use a conjunction to connect these two clauses.

• He is clever, and therefore he gets good marks.

Another example is given below.

• She was a talented singer therefore she didn’t have much difficulty getting good offers.

This sentence needs to be rewritten as:

• She was a talented singer. Therefore, she didn’t have much difficulty getting good offers.
• She was a talented singer; therefore, she didn’t have much difficulty getting good offers.
• She was a talented singer, and therefore she didn’t have much difficulty getting good offers.

The conjunction so has a similar meaning to therefore.

• She was a talented singer so she didn’t have much difficulty getting good offers.