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As an editor one thing I try to look for is missing or misplaced commas, or commas that are not needed.
This morning, in reading the online version of the San Jose Mercury ( California ), I saw this headline:
2-year-old, mother shot in Menlo Park drive-by
But still being half asleep, I missed the comma, and read it as:
2-year-old mother shot in Menlo Park drive-by
??? a 2 year old mother ??? That woke me up as I reread it.
In the past 20 years or so I've read several books, or chapters in books, on punctuation. The one place they seem to disagree with each other most is on where or whether to place a comma.
It's gotten so that I tend to follow the advice of one book, whose name I've forgotten.
Its rule:
If in doubt, listen to yourself as you read the sentence, either aloud or silently. If you hear a slight pause at the end of a phrase, use a comma. If you do not hear a pause, do not use a comma. If it is clearly a subordinate clause, separate it with a comma at the end of the preceding phrase and after the subordinate clause.
An example of this last is the ( or chapters in books )four paragraphs ahead of this one.
But even following this, there are exceptions to the rule and other experts who will disagree.
Holly
Comments
Proper comma placement IS important.
No need for a "can be"...
I am the choir
No kidding. For the couple times I've edited for someone, adjusting the comma is the bulk of the time spent in my editing, followed by spelling and phrasing and then other sentence issues and paragraph structure.
I am no grammar ace either and certain constructions, while seemingly logical to me, are not by convention correct punctuation. *shrug*, some issues are irrelevant to telling the story but are there to defend the language. The comma however is as basic as the measures of a musical score and whether you have a story that is a symphonic masterpiece or a backyard garage band cacophony is in no small measure due to the humble comma.
It happens to the best of us too as the last sentence of the following excerpt from 'Somewhere Else Entirely' Part 66 shows:
----->
Her first kick took him in the gut. He folded with an oof! and began to collapse on the ground. Garia continued to swivel and her second kick took him on the shoulder, rather than his chest as she had expected.
Accuracy's off, she noted. Damned Kalikan!
Still turning, her right arm straightened and the heel of her right hand smacked into Trogan's forehead instead of his temple. He fell over backwards, his head striking the pavement with a distinct crack. Garia began straightening up, continuing to turn so that she could see what else was happening.
I should so not be doing this now!
As Garia spun Keren, who was still a few paces from the man on Trogan's left, dived forward to try and reach him before he released his bolt.
------>
Word's spell checker and grammar checker would never spot such a thing.
Kim
Bravo!
Well spotted!
I do make a point of going through and removing or adjusting commas before I post a chapter but this was one I overlooked.
Thinking about it (it needed another comma before 'Keren' for it to make sense), that would have made the whole sentence seem clumsy and I ought to have written the line a different way.
My most common (and bad) mannerism is to add commas before the words 'and' and 'but'. Re-reading shows me that most of these are superfluous and I remove them.
I don't always get it right.
I don't use Word (or even Windows) but something called 'LibreOffice' and I've munged it up somehow so I don't even get a spell-checker now. I really am flying by the seat of my pants and it isn't easy to cattch everything.
Penny
Made the sentence clumsy?
Well, it depends on whether you want it to have that old 1930s Hollywood adventure story feel to it where you have the narrator voicing the questions or doubts of some dangerous situation the hero had gotten into and is now seemingly on a precipice. The power of the comma :)
Kim
Breakfast, Armadillos, and Three's Company reruns
I am a comma feind, and if anything an overcommatator, which is now a word.
What gets me the most is the use of commas in series, such as:
My three favorite things are breakfast, armadillos, and Three's Company reruns.
I've seen lots of "modern" text where it is apprarently now acceptable to omit the last comma in the series. So you have "red, white and blue" instead of "red, white, and blue".
This is why society is breaking down.
Kids these days, with ther hula hoops, rock and roll music and omitted commas.
Lists
In the UK we were taught, back in the Jurassic, that when you enumerated a list the last item should be indicated by 'and' but that there should be no comma before the 'and'.
I do know that grammer rules in the colonies were slightly different.
Penny
This is why
This is why we had a revolution.
Give me liberty or give me
Give me liberty or give me Oxford commas!
Oxford comma
That comma before the "and" is called an Oxford comma (because of some outdated Victorian stylebook supposedly based on rules for papers submitted to Oxford Press). In modern grammar, it is optional, only required when otherwise things would be confusing. But it isn't wrong to put it in where it isn't needed.
It's funny that you say in the UK you were taught NOT to use it because here in the States, slavishly inserting it every time is considered a Britishism. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
This I vow
I will walk the earth planting oxford commas in my wake. All shall know them, and tremble at their magnificence.
This I vow.
Commas can be critical!
My friend was in an auto accident last year, and he was in a comma for three days!
That IS what we're talking about, right?
**Sigh**
Sighs are the natural language of the heart.
-Thomas Shadwell
Not hardly...
It's a habit that varies by author and audience.
In the UK, the "serial comma" tends to be omitted, but both the Oxford University Press style manual and Fowler's Modern English Usage prefer it, so it's just a bit unfair to call it the Oxford comma.
In the USA, the AP Style Guide (typical of newspaper writing) advises against it, but the AP guide is designed for newspapers, for which commas cost money, since they incrementally increase the inches used by stories. The Chicago Manual of Style prefers them, since their omission can be confusing.
Quick, is the writer seriously claiming the Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi had a love child, and that she is that same child?
To be fair, since the comma is used to indicate two entirely different relationships, seriality and identity, it's possible to construct ambiguous or confusing sentences using either convention.
It's also true that omitting that serial comma is inconsistent with the other common list-item-separator, the semicolon, which is never omitted, whether it might be confusing of not.
The upshot of all this is to use commas 'wisely,' with careful attention paid to how they work in every individual sentence. There are no hard and fast rules which can be followed in every instance, and sometimes it may be necessary to reword a sentence entirely to make one's meaning plain, which is always a good idea.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Making one's meaning plain.
This is very common advise in modern writing and style manuals... And while, for nonfiction, I must agree... When it comes to fiction sometimes it is a good idea to camouflage your meaning. Make it plain enough to inject the idea into your readers brain to be ignited later by a revelatory scene. It is REALLY nice, in my opinion at least, to have these "Aha!" moments while reading. ESPECIALLY when I get the "Aha!" at the same time as the main character(s). At this point, it helps build immersion. Which is absolutely essential for good fiction.
EDIT:
Though I must admit it is important to understand EXACTLY what you are playing with and why if you are going to go for this trick instead of plain writing, and, if you are for whatever reason, not competent enough to pull it off: stick to plain writing.
Abigail Drew.
A differrent order...
...might be a better way to write that line. "I'd like to thank Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Ghandi and my parents" would be my thinking. Saving the most important to last.
If you are on Facebook, Grammarly is a good 'friend' to have.
optional for you, perhaps
Easy for you to say. I'm with Krunch. :)
not as think as i smart i am
I'm confused, what is this
I'm confused, what is this comma you are speaking of? Isn't it just where some fly has crapped on the page? Damn flies. :P
But ...
... shouldn't your last sentence read?:
But, even following this, there are exceptions to the rule and other experts who will disagree. :)
ie an extra comma after the 'But'. Because 'even following this' is actually in parenthesis and the sentence would read well without its being there. As for starting a sentence with a conjunction ... the horror! :) Perhaps 'However' might be better - not that it matters much.
I suppose we're back to dear old Lynne Truss's book title 'Eats Shoots and Leaves' aren't we?
Not sure about the USA but in the UK, my wife tells me, legal documents use no punctuation except full stops and capital letters for the very reason that a misplaced comma can change the meaning so fundamentally.
You're doing a great job with Melodie Thomas's 'Stolen Innocence' btw. Now tell me what I've got wrong here. It's a rule of life that any contribution criticising grammar will always have at least one error itself :)
Robi
Self-referencing
I believe that's know as 'Muphry's Rule'.
Penny
I figured I'd stir up some comments
Now, some comments back.
I was taught that one should try not to begin a sentence with 'But', but that it is not a hard and fast rule.
However, as an editor, I usually do change 'But' to 'However' when it begins a sentence.
As to use of a comma before the last item in a string of items, the rule I was originally taught was that it is optional.
Once I began editing, I had to learn a lot about English, and then I was taught this:
If the items are a string of things, do not use a comma before the last item.
However, if it is a string of actions, or items followed by an action, you MUST use a comma before the last item.
But as far as the technicalities of English, I am pretty well self taught, ( from books, not formal classes), other than specific things such as comma placement, trying not to begin a sentence with (but) or end one with (also), or use (then) as the second word in a sentence that begins with a name, (noun or pronoun), though those words were not used.
To give a bit of my background, I began school in a 2 room, 8 grade county school out in the country. First graders were sort of pushed over in a corner with crayons.
Also, unlike today, with Sesame Street to give toddlers an early start, television was not well established. My family did not have a TV until I was 15, for that matter. But the prevailing wisdom was that parents should NOT attempt to try to teach a child anything, as then the teacher might have to unteach the child before beginning proper teaching. My parents followed that except that I could count and knew my alphabet.
Luckily, 3 months into the school year we moved into town. In the new city school, at the first recess I was asked where I had gone to Kindergarten. My reply was, "what is Kindergarten?"
I was more than 3 months behind, but took only 3-4 weeks to get from just knowing my alphabet, to get into the top reading group.
The school also did not teach English as a course, at least not until 5th grade. They just taught reading, writing, Speaking and spelling. In the middle of my 5th year we moved again, to a school that began teaching English as such, parts of speech, sentence diagramming and the like, in the 3rd year.
Because I could read and write well, and was ahead in Math as well, put in 6th year part of the time and 5th part of the time, but I was not given an English course until my 7th year, at which time I was 3+ years behind, and I sort of gave up on learning parts of speech and the like. I passed, barely, because of my writing.
It was 30 years after I graduated from High School before I began teaching writing and had to go back and learn all that I'd missed in school.
I'm sure I still have weak points, but I've made many notes on issues I face and either write them out in my own words, or copy from my notes or a couple of texts when correcting in my editing.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
My story is a little similar
My story is a little similar to yours, except for the moving part, and no TV part, and the ending is a little different. You know, really they aren't that much alike except in tone. :P
Back when I was in grade school it was discovered that I had dyslexia, and being the forward thinking, caring, inspirational school that it was those in charge adopted the 'who cares about the dummies?' policy. So I was shuffled off to the special education room to spend my time with people who had mental retardation and played with toys all day. I think it goes without saying that the educational value of this class was very low except when it came to learning how to tie your shoes and the proper need of hygiene. Thankfully my parents put up enough of a fuss so that I was allowed to attend regular classed in the science, math and history classes. But when it came to anything involving reading or English I was plum out of luck.
Eventually when I moved on up to middle school I put my foot down and said 'you can go to hell I ain't going back in that room', at least that's as close as I can remember to what I said. So I spent the rest of my school career in regular classes. Luckily enough after 7th grade I went on a trip to England and after landing found that I could suddenly read. (I had always carried books around with me because I wanted to be able to read them and because I loved stories and I would try to get people to read them to me.) I went from not being able to read anything to being able to read any book I liked pretty much over night. My mother declared it a miracle, praise god hallelujah, and the rest is pretty much history.
Of course there was one little problem, I had never learned the basics of the English language, and while I could read I could never spell, not even to this day. Unfortunately, unlike you, I have never spent the time to try in catch up on what I had missed in my formative years beyond the most cursory of studies, instead I have relied on poor learned fools (who are fantastic people) that I have trick into doing editing for me. ;)
As Susanna Centlivre once said in the play, The Busie Body
"But me no buts," not to mention Henry Fielding some years later, and a thousand since.
Starting sentences with conjunctions has a long history in English, so objections are purely prescriptivist, which is an quibble, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, up with which I shall not put.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Another example
As those who've read a certain Lynn Truss tome will know:
A comma before the last item in a list is termed either a "serial comma" or an "Oxford comma". Opinions vary on whether to leave it in or take it out: in some cases, adding it creates ambiguity, in others, taking it out creates ambiguity, and in yet others the phrasing creates ambiguity whether the comma is kept in or left out! See Wikipedia: Serial comma for more details.
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Punctuating
Hi all,
on the off-chance that someone has not seen this one ........
An English professor wrote on the board: A woman without her man is nothing.
The class was then asked to punctuate the sentence.
The men wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing."
The women wrote: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."
....
.....
....
A written piece without punctuation, or, worse, with incorrect punctuation is like having a phone call or Skype call loaded with interference. It makes the communication awkward and tiresome rather than a pleasurable experience.
And writing is simply a method of communication.
....
....
....
I must say that my pet aversion is the misuse of the apostrophe (called by some an inverted comma).
There are 2 reasons to use it.
a) To indicate that letters are missing ---- don't rather than do not, or they're rather than they are
b) To indicate possession ---- It was Garia's decision, or it was Cathy's blue light
It should NEVER be used for plurals.
Having mentioned "they're", can I please beg authors to learn and understand the difference between "there", "their" and "they're".
"Heels" and "heals".
. . . .
My list of these errors grows on a daily basis, it seems.
.....
Living as I do in a German-speaking land, I have noticed that we English use a comma almost as if it were a set of parentheses ----- The ball, kicked by David Beckham, swerved into the top right corner of the goal.
German-speakers, on the other hand, use commas to end phrases and sub-sentences; which is a differing emphasis. There were many German-speaking immigrants into the US and, I suspect (UK usage here), is one of the root causes of the confusion that exists about comma usage.
Then, of course, we have the ......
*steps down from the soap-box as the rotten tomatoes fly*
Yes, Holly, those commas can
easily change the whole complexion of a sentence.
May Your Light Forever Shine
Just the medicine I needed
In both the excitement , and so that I did not chicken out, I posted my first part of my story. The problem was this was before I had really calmed down, and slowly re-read the entire work. It was a stinging comment from a well meaning, but blunt, reader who pointed my attention, to the lacking of comas, and other punctuation. I was up in the air as to what constituted the proper use of this little essential critters. But by the end of part 2 I started to use the method you proscribe.
I also find the comments posted during these discussions, are as helpful as the original postings. Now I need to digest this new information, and, practice, practice, practice, Until I stop annoying my readers.
Misha Nova
With those with open eyes the world reads like a book
Let us all count our blessings...
Language is a sort of dance in which we mostly agree on the basic steps, but may well differ on the flourishes. When written language started out, most of the punctuation indications we enjoy today were completely absent, including not only commas, but periods, question marks, paragraph indications, and even spaces between words. Go figure.
One thirteenth century monk once wrote that the scriptorium in which he laboured was so noisy that he couldn't read — an odd sort of thing to read in these days of libraries and study halls are quiet places where speaking is often forbidden or discouraged — because in those days each and every letter sound had to be spoken aloud in order to tease out the meaning by a process of trial and error, so if he couldn't *hear* himself speaking, he couldn't separate the flow of sounds into words. Of course all the rest of his fellow scribes had the same problem, so *every* monk tried to outshout the people next to him, something like a football game, one imagines.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
More punctuation
While we are on the subject, I recall this from about the 5th grade:
"Punctuate the following sentences"
John where Mary had had had had had had had Had had was correct"
OK, here is one possibility:
John, where Mary had had "had" had had "had had." "Had had" was correct.
Don't let someone else talk you out of your dreams. How can we have dreams come true, if we have no dreams?
Katrina Gayle "Stormy" Storm
Belated reply to the comma question
As a frequent abuser of thee comma I keep thinking back to an old Benny Hill gaga.
Two women are reading a script and..
"What's that up in the road, a head?'"
Then Benny comes in all upset.
"No, no, no you sill cows. It's "What's that up in the road ahead?"
BIG difference..
And as to not splitting infinitives, and other *rules*? Comes down to personal taste. Some of these confusing rules we were taught are the products of a ill considered attempt by so-called language *experts* back in the 1800s trying to apply Latin grammar rules to American English which is primarily a Germanic language, with bits of French and other stuff grafted on.
BTW Holly is one of the best proofers here. Nice to see her commenting. I hope all is well with you and yours.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa