According to the New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage, an appositive is "a word or a phrase that identifies the noun or pronoun that immediately precedes it.".
Appositive phrases in English language explains or identifies the nouns or pronouns in a sentence. If these phrases are not essential to the meaning of the sentence, they are separated with commas.
Example: Amazon is launching Astro, its first household robot, powered by its Alexa smart home technology.
But if you look at your favourite newspapers or websites, nobody cares about these rules. Appositive phrases are aplenty, set off with an opening punctuation like comma, and not closed with the same punctuation.
"Persistent Systems founder and chairman Anand Deshpande, a newly minted Indian billionaire says being in the ultra-rich has changed nothing other than the number of people now saying that they know him," said a news story on MoneyControl.com.
The editorial desk did not see it fit to add a comma after 'billionaire'.
If the error is corrected, the sentence will be read as:
"Persistent Systems founder and chairman Anand Deshpande, a newly minted Indian billionaire, says..."
This problem of wrong punctuation is not restricted to this website. But you can find it everywhere with an alarming variations in incorrect usage.
