To Comma or NOT to Comma

In the past I've had several discussions with Elizabeth (I was going to put in some appositional text explaining that she’s my friend, but I think you’re all intelligent enough to know by now that she's one of my really good friends—I think I just put that appositional text in anyway) about the use of grammar and punctuation in writing. She gets irritated by grammar Nazis who suck all of the fun out of the ‘art’ of writing, contending that writing shouldn’t be relegated so rigidly to the strict rules of a scientific formula—hence the term ‘language arts’. If I understand her correctly she’s of the opinion that like visual arts, writing should/can /does have some framework rules to get by/fall back on and after that one should rely on intuitive and perhaps even experimental methods to find one’s own style. Elizabeth, if you’re reading and I’ve got this wrong, comment away, but that’s how I understood you. When writing my blog I’ve tried to do some experimentation in order to more finely distinguish my own writing style/voice, whatever you want to call it. In all this experimentation however, one thing that comes grating frequently up against my equanimity is the evil comma. I always thought I understood the major fundamentals concerning this nefariously elusive punctuation: things such as putting one after ever item in a list, right before introducing a quote, after an introductory phrase, before using a coordinating conjunction and using it parenthetically. Other than that I’ve always understood that one’s choice in comma usage was like one’s color choice in painting—yes, there’s conventionally acceptable hue combinations that people seem to interpret as rules (that’s a whole ‘nother subject, don’t get me started)—but honestly THERE ARE NO rules. There are NO REAL color rules. Sorry, people, it’s true, when it comes down to it, it’s all subjective preference. Oops, looks like I went off on a tirade anyhow, pardon. Anyway, that’s what I’ve understood, commas are a stylistic method of pausing or clarifying; and like color use, there is traditionally accepted and recognized usage, but no hard fast rules when it comes to the stylistic pause or clarification. Anyway, I’ll be frank: using the comma as a stylistic tool drives me nuts. Like the compositional use of repeated elements and/or patterns in the visual arts—because there’s always a point at which you can debate all day as to whether that picture looks better or worse with or without that bright green geometrical shape floating around in the background next to the other lemon yellow geometric shape meant to sit in compositional space and draw the eye around the page—commas can be expendable.

Below are some amusing quotes I found on goodreads that express the frustrating core of the problem better than I ever could (well okay, some of them have nothing to do with the above mentioned quandary, they’re just good fun). (Back to the visual arts analogy—people like to exalt great artists' works and make them seem incapable of putting anything in a composition that isn't intentional, but I just don't believe that—they might have become so compositionally skillful that their intuition carries them through to intentional looking elements, but I’m not sure everything can be ever 100% intentional; I mean look at Kandinsky, yah, his work is visually gratifying and fun to look at, but you can’t tell me that the absence of one or two of those geometric shapes [among the multitudes] would materially deform his work.) (In fact, in the picture below, I rather prefer the geometric design sans the column of circles to the far left—cover them up with your finger and see what you think—or reversely, cover up the far right column, that combination is good too.)

• "I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."-Oscar Wilde

• "Thurber was asked by a correspondent:“Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room?’ And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. ‘This particular comma,’ Thurber explained, ‘was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.’”— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)



• "The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath." — Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart
  

• "It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones. It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward?" — Laurie Halse Anderson
  


• "He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway." — Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)
  

• "Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.” — Carolyn Kizer
  
  

***P.S. Below is a link to an interesting article on the use of the English language in writing and especially on the use of commas in writing:

http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/writing.php?id=82