The Committee For the Correct Use of Commas
Quite often when I'm helping to edit this on-campus magazine that my life appears to revolve around, I get very upset over the use of commas.
One of our other editors held equally strong views regarding their proper use, and for a long time I thought she tended to be a bit militant about it. After all, in the general scheme of a well-written article, would a couple of misplaced commas really call for the writer to be branded with the ignominy of the illiterate?
And then, of course, we took on a few more writers, and the problem became self-evident.
Look. I'm not saying you're the dregs of the underworld if your first comma is missing in [sentence fragment], [additional info], [sentence completes here]. But there are certain rules that need to be followed - and yes, not all of them make sense, but human traditions are sticky little businesses - and you have just got to follow them, okay?
On a side note, there's an interesting story regarding commas in lists. Remember how your teacher beat it into your head that if you had [thing1], [thing2], and [thing3], you had to, on pain of death, include a comma after [thing2]? If you think about it, your teacher seems a little redundant. "Hello," you say to yourself, being a deep thinker obsessed with punctuation, "if I'm saying toes, penguins, and pencils, then why do I bother with a comma when the penguins and pencils are firmly chained together with that 'and'?"
The story is that newspapers, which had daily deadlines and frazzled typesetters who had to cast letters with small iron blocks and kept losing the tiny bits like commas, left out that extra comma deliberately. "We're on a bloody deadline!" screams the typesetter to the editor. "I don't care if you think you're selling your soul to the devil of poor literacy, we refuse to include that extra comma!"
A few streets away, in a quieter and posher district, the typesetter and editor of the Monthly Magazine are enjoying a contented postprandial brandy. "In what further foolish ways," asks the editor, "can we set ourselves apart from that newspaper rabble when it comes to style and elegance?" The typesetter stares at his glass thoughtfully. "We can consistently put in that extra comma - you know the one I mean."
The next morning the Newspaper Typesetter rashly challenges the Magazine Typesetter to a pistol duel after M.T. suggests that this punctuation-poor newspaper is nothing more than a bumwipe. Ten days later M.T. dies tragically of a bullet wound in the shape of a comma.
The point of the matter is - well all right, there isn't one, I just thought it was interesting - anyway, this argument happened a long time ago, and although even something like punctuation is slowly evolving, the old rules still stand to a large extent.
Please - refrain from comma cruelty. Leave a better legacy for our future generations.
One of our other editors held equally strong views regarding their proper use, and for a long time I thought she tended to be a bit militant about it. After all, in the general scheme of a well-written article, would a couple of misplaced commas really call for the writer to be branded with the ignominy of the illiterate?
And then, of course, we took on a few more writers, and the problem became self-evident.
Look. I'm not saying you're the dregs of the underworld if your first comma is missing in [sentence fragment], [additional info], [sentence completes here]. But there are certain rules that need to be followed - and yes, not all of them make sense, but human traditions are sticky little businesses - and you have just got to follow them, okay?
On a side note, there's an interesting story regarding commas in lists. Remember how your teacher beat it into your head that if you had [thing1], [thing2], and [thing3], you had to, on pain of death, include a comma after [thing2]? If you think about it, your teacher seems a little redundant. "Hello," you say to yourself, being a deep thinker obsessed with punctuation, "if I'm saying toes, penguins, and pencils, then why do I bother with a comma when the penguins and pencils are firmly chained together with that 'and'?"
The story is that newspapers, which had daily deadlines and frazzled typesetters who had to cast letters with small iron blocks and kept losing the tiny bits like commas, left out that extra comma deliberately. "We're on a bloody deadline!" screams the typesetter to the editor. "I don't care if you think you're selling your soul to the devil of poor literacy, we refuse to include that extra comma!"
A few streets away, in a quieter and posher district, the typesetter and editor of the Monthly Magazine are enjoying a contented postprandial brandy. "In what further foolish ways," asks the editor, "can we set ourselves apart from that newspaper rabble when it comes to style and elegance?" The typesetter stares at his glass thoughtfully. "We can consistently put in that extra comma - you know the one I mean."
The next morning the Newspaper Typesetter rashly challenges the Magazine Typesetter to a pistol duel after M.T. suggests that this punctuation-poor newspaper is nothing more than a bumwipe. Ten days later M.T. dies tragically of a bullet wound in the shape of a comma.
The point of the matter is - well all right, there isn't one, I just thought it was interesting - anyway, this argument happened a long time ago, and although even something like punctuation is slowly evolving, the old rules still stand to a large extent.
Please - refrain from comma cruelty. Leave a better legacy for our future generations.