Conclusion: Commas Are Essential to Writing
In closing this exploration of the comma, here is a fun example that drives home the importance of mastering this common yet often misunderstood writing tool. The example is slightly modified from an example that Lynne Truss shares in her punctuation handbook, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
Consider the following sentence:
The woman without her man is nothing.
Not a good statement to make, is it? (When I present this sentence in English classes, I become the target of many an angry glare from female students.) Now, let’s improve this sentence by adding some commas:
The woman, without her, man is nothing.
Two commas—and nothing more—have drastically altered the meaning of this sentence. In fact, this second sentence expresses the very opposite message from that of the first.
Commas matter. Far too often, people think of commas as cute separating squiggles—useful, to be sure, but hardly critical. Transformed completely by the presence of two commas, the sentence above blows popular underestimations of the comma clean out of the water.
Granted, commas may not always make as drastic a change as the one seen in the example above, but they often make for some kind of difference in meaning. And, even if they do not change a sentence’s meaning, commas tell our audience how to read our prose. Commas tell readers where to pause and where to lower intonation. Commas, without taking up any more than a single space of text, identify clauses, phrases, and words that act as modifying asides within larger sentences. Commas play much the same role that rests play in music, and that negative space plays in visual art. Just as absence is essential to music and art, so too is the comma essential to writing. To understand and apply the comma is to manipulate absence, as well as presence, in the art of writing; it gives you control, not only over what is said, but also over what is not said.
With these points in mind, mastering this writing essential is worth your best effort.
Next up: Myths We Learn in Grade-School English
Well, that’s it for commas (at least, for now). It’s time to move on to another subject, one that I find both fascinating and troubling. In the course of our early education in English and writing, many of us learn sets of writing rules, especially in the form of “do” and “do not.” Useful in the early stages of writing, these rules are presented to us as set-in-stone absolutes, and not as practices that are subject to change. But, as we develop as thinkers and writers, these rules begin to seem constrictive and even counter-productive to our writing. Still, so adamantly did our childhood teachers express these rules, that we cringe even at the thought of breaking them.
Do you know what I’m talking about? Here are a few examples I’ll bet you’ve encountered. Have you ever heard a teacher say, “Never begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions like and or but”? Or maybe you’ve heard this one: “Do not ever use the personal pronoun you in your writing”? Do these rules trouble you, given the fact that journalists and award-winning writers frequently commit such taboos to create expressive, moving prose? Do you ever find yourself wanting—or perhaps needing—to break these rules?
If so, the upcoming series of articles, entitled, “Myths We Learn in Grade-School English,” is for you.
Here is a link to the introduction of that series:
Christopher Altman, a community-college composition specialist, is passionate about bringing the art of effective wri
ting to average, everyday Americans. He has published work in the field of medieval literature, and has authored a book on advertising language entitled, Telling the Truth to Deceive: How Advertisers Manipulate the English Language. Mr. Altman is an assistant professor of English at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York.
