Crystal has three questions:
Should I say my favorite animal is tiger or my favorite animal is tigers?
My favorite food is sausage? or my favorite food is sausages?
"He loves to cook and she loves to sing." Do I need to put a comma before "and?"
In the first case, I would say "My favorite animal is the tiger" or "The tiger is my favorite animal." If I use the plural (tigers), then I would also have to say "animals": "My favorite animals are tigers." This sounds as if you have two or three specific tigers that are your favorite animals.
In the second case, I would also use the singular: "My favorite food is sausage," or "Sausage is my favorite food." We are talking about a general kind of food, sausage, which has many varieties: bratwurst, pork sausage, chorizo, and so on. If we want to be more specific, we might say: "Sausage is my favorite food, especially bratwurst."
As for the third question, it's a general rule that when you link two complete clauses with a conjunction like "and" or "but" or "so," you should put a comma before the conjunction. So it would be OK to say: "He loves to cook, and she loves to sing."
However, when the clauses are as short as these, you can drop the comma because no one is going to be confused. Suppose you wanted to say: "He loves to cook and bake and make beer and she loves to sing and dance and play the guitar." Now we have a lot of "ands" linking verbs, PLUS an "and" linking the two sentences.
To avoid confusion, we really need a comma: "He loves to cook and bake and make beer, and she loves to sing and dance and play the guitar." The comma after "beer" tells us that we've finished the first clause, and now we're going on to another one.
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