Sentenceworks Blog

If you want to get some linguists all tied up in a knot, just say the word “comma”.  If you want a really big brouhaha, make sure half of those linguists are American and the other half British.

Good times all around.

Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote this beautiful sentences in a short story called Loot (2003):

He has a lot of - things - some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must be fond of, some of which he doesn’t notice, deliberately, that he probably shouldn’t have acquired but cannot cast off, there’s an art nouveau lamp he reads by, and above his bed-head a Japanese print, a Hokusai, ‘The Great Wave’, he doesn’t really collect oriental stuff, although if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings, it’s been out of sight behind his head for years.

Marvelous sentence.  Drives any writer to their knees in awe.  Drives the average linguist around the bend.

If you wrote such a sentence in a formal essay, you’d fail; creative writing demands the re-reading of sentences for pleasure, and formal writing demands clear, straight-forward communication.

Comma usage is - and probably always will be - up for debate.  The Americans have a fairly mathematical approach to commas (they’re notorious for serial commas and FANBOYS, and putting commas inside the quotes) while the British are more logical about it: commas go outside the quotes, and are used where necessary to make things easy for the reader.  Even within a particular English usage, people will argue whether or not a comma is appropriate.

The bottom line is, you’ll never find the “right” answer, just a handful of logical ones.  The OWL at Purdue has a really good PowerPoint slide on commas which you can download from here.  You can also look at their Comma Quick Rules page.

If you’re writing for a particular employer or professor, read some of their writing and see how they use commas (serial commas?  is “as” included in the list of FANBOYS?  do they like Nadine Gordimer’s writing?)  If you can’t get your hands on some of their writing, ask them specifically about their comma preferences; this way, you won’t fail.

Commas may drive you batty, but they’re also very interesting.  Here’s a lovely little video which covers the basics - with a smile!  There’s a website which gives a short history of punctuation, including commas.  For those of you who spend your summer on Facebook, there’s a page in favour of the Oxford comma.

Like the mud-puddles you examined as a child, commas are intriguing once you get knee-deep in them.