I’ve been thinking about writing this one for quite a while, but I’ve just had a lot of other stuff going on.
But I can’t stay silent anymore. We need to talk about a serious issue that’s impeding our ability to have the simplest of conversations.
No, I’m not talking about the fraying political discourse.
I’m talking about a tiny, useful piece of punctuation that two-thirds of the internet has apparently forgotten how to use.
It is the comma. The brave little toaster of the punctuation family. Stalwart, unassuming, and essential.
When did web writers decide the comma was just an annoying interruption? That they could just leave most of them out, because no one cares about that stuff now?
And then — as if regretting their previous poor choices — sprinkle a few commas randomly on top, perhaps to make it look more … punctuate-y.
Please, please my dear fellow writers, knock it off
When you leave out the commas, particularly if you then throw a couple of random ones in there, your content runs the risk of looking uninformed, silly … or just plain confusing.
“Do you love dogs the planet your flag and country babies justice equality freedom?”
That’s a quote from a recent post of mine, with the commas tragically ripped away.
That one’s a little extreme, since it’s a list of nouns. Notice, though, how you’re not sure which words belong together. Is it “country babies?” “Equality freedom?”
I see only slightly less extreme versions of this in content every day.
Sentences I need to re-read to figure out which words go together. Sentences that stop me in the middle, like that horrible person who brakes in the middle of the street to read a text. And sentences that just seem to be running out of breath.
I love what Ursula Le Guin had to say about punctuation in her book on narrative, Steering the Craft:
“… punctuation tells the reader ‘how to hear’ our writing. That’s what it’s for. Commas and periods bring out the grammatical structure of a sentence; they make it clear to the understanding, and the emotions, by showing what it sounds like — where the breaks come, where to pause.”
Take the last bit of that and strip away the punctuation. Notice how hard it gets to understand:
they make it clear to the understanding and the emotions by showing what it sounds like where the breaks come where to pause
Getting your punctuation in order isn’t about making English teachers happy. (Although that, also, is a worthy goal.)
It’s about making your writing clearer, more pleasing, and easier to read.
Does punctuation matter in “conversational” copy?
Some writers feel that the rules of punctuation will make their writing stuffy. Better to just “write like I talk,” and let the voice make a connection.
I think learning to write like you talk is a magnificent goal. It’s not always easy to learn.
Getting a really good grasp on punctuation allows you to write more like you talk, by giving the reader a simple way to understand the structure of each sentence.
If you’re writing content for any kind of purpose — for clients, to support your business, or even to promote a hobby or other personal goal — your words have to find the right place in your audience’s ears. Punctuation helps that happen naturally and painlessly.
A special note for professional writers
Those of us who write for a living have an additional obligation.
If you’re the designated scribe for someone else, it’s your responsibility to make that person or company look amazing.
When professional writers get sloppy about commas and other punctuation, they make their clients or their organizations look ill-educated and careless. And that’s not okay.
How to polish your skills
You were probably a lot less geeky than I was when you were in 9th grade. Nearly everyone was.
So you may not have been paying rapt attention when your teacher talked about comma usage, or what semicolons are for, or how to form the trickier possessive plurals.
We’re lucky to live in the 21st century, with a bunch of useful resources to help us fill in those gaps.
The best option is probably to hire a good proofreader (or possibly even an off-duty English teacher) to look over your work and find the errors. If this person is really wonderful, they can explain the errors to you, so you’re less likely to make them again.
That’s not workable for everyone, and — this will strike some as heresy — I have no problem with writers using a tool like Grammarly to help find missing commas (and get rid of the ones that are there for no reason).
Early automated usage and grammar correctors were pretty dumb. They tended to introduce a lot of errors and mark perfectly acceptable usage as incorrect.
The new tools, like Grammarly, are smarter. But they’re still not perfect, and that brings us to the next point …
Develop a solid understanding of punctuation rules
If Grammarly or your proofreader flags a missing comma and you don’t understand why, take a minute or two and figure it out.
You can check websites like Grammar Girl, or books like The Well-Tempered Sentence or The Elements of Style Illustrated. (A friend just turned me on to the illustrated version of that classic, and it’s a charmer.)
You can hire a tutor for an hour or two. Or get on Facebook and find out which of your friends were English majors.
I wouldn’t get too hung up on a specific style. In 2018, it doesn’t matter much whether you prefer AP Style or Chicago, or how you feel about the serial comma. Just be consistent and deliberate with your choices.
And for the love of your country your faith mom apple pie democracy kittens and everything else that is decent and right and good please get some commas into your blog posts before I have some kind of an unfortunate brain event.
Thank you.
(And for my compatriots, have a terrific Fourth!)
Reader Comments (14)
I love grammar tools, even the hopelessly flawed Microsoft Word, because I know enough about punctuation to know when to agree and when to disagree. The computer simply asks me the question.
And for those people who insist on putting a comma between the subject and the verb that immediately follows it, are you trying to talk like William Shatner?
When I lived in DC, I was friends with a political speech writer. I listened to him prompt the politician: “When you see a comma – PAUSE. Breathe. Let a second to pass, it will give impact and clarify what you are saying by allowing the listeners to absorb the words.” As the politician stepped onto the stage, my friend once more said: Pause!! It was a very impressive speech. I believe in commas. They are powerful when used properly. As an editor, I cringe when I see them tossed about by the writer in a willy-nilly style… or ignored completely. I read a work, in it, one paragraph, 2/3 of a full page, single-spaced with only a capital letter at the start and a period at the end. No other punctuation! The author had no idea what a comma was. There were NONE in his work… well, that is until I finished editing. LOL.
They really are powerful little critters.
Bless the person(s) who invented Grammarly! I not only feel more confident using it, I’ve learned a LOT. As you suggested, rather than just blindly making corrections I look up things I don’t understand and it’s gratifying to see that I’m making fewer mistakes than when I started using it. Thanks for the important reminder.
It’s amazing how quickly you can progress when you use a tool like that as a prompt to check something, rather than just letting it try to write for you. 🙂 That’s how you get better!
Thanks for your note!
Ah, the comma. A comma tells you how to read. Commas also tell you when to stop, to breath, and to move forward. What a blessing. Thank goodness I err on the side of using comments, versus writing runaway sentences.
Good article. Without proper use of commas and other punctuation, you sound like Archy the cockroach (and if that name doesn’t ring any bells, Google it).
Archy and Mehitabel.
Amen, Sonia! The misuse and disuse of the comma is one of my biggest grammar pet peeves. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who appreciates this seemingly lowly but incredibly important punctuation mark!
I blog in English, which is not my first language. It’s harder but more fun for me. I use Grammarly to check my grammar. In my mother tongue, the comma usage is the same as in English so I also dislike the misuse and disuse of it.
Oh my God….commas!! What about all the terrible, outrageous spelling I’m trying to make sense of!!! I don’t get it!
I’m with you. Also, gratuitous exclamation marks! 🙂
For a minute, I thought I was doing something wrong writing my posts.
I have a good suggestion for your book club. “Humboldt’s Gift,” A 1976 Nobel-Prize-winning novel by Saul Bellow, who incidentally does away with commas.
Although a novel narrative is one thing, and mandatory punctuation in blog writing, another.
Writing like you talk is even more difficult, if English is not your first language. There are times I think in my native language when writing, and if I wrote things in English along my thought, it makes little sense without punctuation. The way we communicate on social media play a big role in sending punctuation marks, especially the comma, into extinction. It’s why some comments sound ridiculous. The comma is very important. I appreciated it a lot, as a theatre student.
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