Each week The Old Editor will attempt to address your entreaties for information and advice on grammar and usage, writing, writer-editor etiquette, and related subjects.
The Old Editor does not address marital and relationship matters, dietary questions, or automobile mechanics.
The question: The Old editor came across this inquiry at an online discussion site: "Is there a punctuation book for dummies? I learned all about transcendentalism (and other worthless garbage), but not how to use a comma in school.
The Old Editor Answers: In The Old Editor's editing classes at Loyola University Maryland, the vexatious comma question comes up every semester, students apparently having been advised that commas are to be scattered throughout a text, much as a server grinds pepper or Parmesan over your pasta.
The problem with the comma is that it serves two different purposes, one required, one optional.
In formal standard English, you must use the comma in certain constructions, among them:
Item: To separate the items in a series: lock, stock, and barrel. (The final comma, often called the Oxford comma, may be omitted, depending on what stylebook you follow.)
Item: To separate independent clauses in a compound sentence: The Old Editor explains the point, and the ready reader takes it in.
Item: To set off appositive phrases and nonrestrictive clauses: The Old Editor, a veteran comma-monger, offers you his expertise, which you can take to the bank.
Item: To introduce a direct quotation: The Old Editor said, "See me after class." (A colon may be used to introduce an extended quotation or, for effect, a particularly emphatic one.)
But, as David Crystal explains in Making a Point, his history of punctuation, the comma developed for a completely separate purpose: to indicate the length of a pause when reading a text aloud. The comma, semicolon, colon, and period originally served the same purpose as the rests in musical notation. That tradition lingers in the discretionary use of the comma, to indicate in print the rhythms of spoken English.
Some writers and publications get carried away. The New Yorker, for example, tends to be heavily comma'd, a practice that can come to look mannered. And I know a reporter who inserts a comma after the initial But in a sentence, every damn time. (That previous comma was discretionary, for emphasis, and so was the second one; the one before and is required.) The reporter's editor won't touch the damned things, leaving it to the copy drudge to clean up the text.
The usage of the comma can be complicated, but you need not become a transparent eye-ball to take it all in.
Got a question for The Old Editor? Write to him at john.mcintyre@baltsun.com. Your name will not be used unless you specifically authorize it.