When I was teaching GED prep a few months ago, we used a book called Morphographs to teach spelling. In it, there were all these spelling rules based on morphographs (smallest parts of a word). One of these rules is that "w" and "y" at the end of

Well, thank you very much! It's beginning to make sense now.

Ok, thanks for your replies; however, I still need more clarification. Is the first sentence correct then? Correct grammatically, syntactically, logically? To me, number 1 does not sound natural, either. It would make more sense to me if it said

I would say ....before we start to plan it.

I put a comma before "and" in a list of three or more items, but as far as I know, it's optional.

Could someone please explain the difference between these two sentences? 1. Her mother, having been such an attentive person, spotted this at once. 2. Her mother, being such an attentive person, spotted this at once.