Wednesday Word Nerd: Comma Chameleon – Part One

Lynne Truss, author of the brilliant book on grammar Eats, Shoots & Leaves, described commas as the border collies of the punctuation family, herding words together into comprehensible phrases. As the former owner of a border collie, I love that image – the humble comma, making sense of it all. To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at this very paragraph without any commas:

“Lynne Truss author of the brilliant book on grammar Eats Shoots & Leaves described commas as the border collies of the punctuation family herding words together into comprehensible phrases. As the former owner of a border collie I love that image – the humble comma making sense of it all. To illustrate what I mean let’s look at this very paragraph without any commas.”

Well, I’m confused.

Compared to a lot of writers, I’m pretty conservative when it comes to using commas. Many of us had teachers who told us that comma = pause. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Commas perform many valuable functions, but “park one wherever I personally might pause to think/breathe” is NOT one of them.

One could write a book about using commas. I’m just going to stick to my preferred misusage. Basically – very, very basically – commas mark something we Word Nerds call “parentheticals.” A parenthetical could be one word or an entire phrase. (It’s called that because you could also put the phrase in parentheses if you were really fancy-schmancy.)

Basically, it’s a blurb you’re sticking in to modify your basic sentence elements in order to produce a more sophisticated and readable sentence. For example, I could’ve written that first sentence like this: “Lynne Truss is the author of a book on grammar called Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In that book, she compared commas to border collies. Commas are like border collies because…” etc. If you’re still awake, then you get the point.

The rule of thumb when using commas this way is that, if you’re plopping a parenthetical into the middle of a sentence, you need commas on both ends of the phrase. (Like I did in that last sentence.) If the modifying parenthetical comes at the beginning of the sentence, then you only need one at the end of it (“Unlike her older sister, Elizabeth understands the proper use of a teasing comb”).

Prepositional phrases can also be parentheticals, and they can not be, too. Whether you place a comma after something like “At the end of the third quarter” is a matter of style. You should definitely consider, though, the readability of your sentence. The same goes for using actual parentheses, dashes or semi-colons in place of commas. It’s kind of a judgment call on your part.

I have a LOT to say about commas, so stay tuned for more next week.