Commotion over the comma.
Every month in Writing Magazine an author submits 300 words for ‘Your writing critique’ by author and lecturer James McCreet.
In the March 2021 issue the author who goes Under the Microscope is Lizzie Barnak. While she has under her belt a prize-winning play and several articles, her chief failing is identified as punctuation. McCreet summarises “….. almost every piece of punctuation (except full stops) is wrong in this extract. That’s not good… Sentences without correct punctuation are not writing.” The main punctuation pitfall for this author is the comma.
So here’s a simple guide to the best use of the comma, which marks a pause between parts of a sentence or separates items in a list.
The term derives from the Greek word for ‘piece cut off’ and was first seen at the end of the 16th century, Like all other parts of the punctuation puzzle, the comma needs to help the reader’s comprehension.
One way is to read your piece out loud and note when you pause (longer pauses involve different items of punctuation, such as the colon, semi-colon, dash and full stop). It is important to avoid over-using the comma because that makes English harder to read and understand.
“The comma … is the most widely used [punctuation mark], indeed too widely used, often being placed where a full stop would be better,” writes Leslie Sellars in his classic book for journalists ‘Doing it in style’ (published in the 1960s but now out of print).
Many people have read or heard of the popular punctuation book by Lynne Truss, ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’, where the sense varies if you remove the comma after Eats or add one after Shoots.
The Oxford comma
This is the controversial extra comma added in some lists for the purposes of clarification. Lexicographer Susie Dent records in her recent book ‘Word Perfect’ that there was a punctuation punch-up after the recent issue of a post-Brexit commemorative 50 pence piece which read: “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.”
Best-selling author Philip Pullman (‘His Dark Materials’) declared that that the coin should be boycotted for missing a comma after prosperity — which suggests that prosperity and friendship are inextricably linked. Dent, who works for Oxford University Press, gave this example of another missing Oxford comma: “I’d like to dedicate this book to my parents, Sarah and God”.
This may seem academic and pedantic to some, but the Oxford comma is widely used in the US as well as in OUP publications.
Breathe life into your punctuation
A young Chinese student, who spoke perfect English, told me she struggled with punctuation. I told her that the answer lay in the breathing. So, make sure you breathe as you read any text to detect whether a comma is advisable or not.