Commas

Trigger warning: The following discussion of commas includes references to serial ones.

 “There are people
who embrace the Oxford comma
and people who don’t,
and I’ll just say this:
never get between these people
when drink has been taken.”
—Lynne Truss

Although my heart will always belong to semicolons, I am also highly enamored of commas, those humble but crucial building blocks of good sentences. Most of us get most of them right often enough to do the job, but this discussion features a few possibly forgotten or less clear directives about how they work.

No: These are the ones I like to talk about. So, this will be a random chat rather than a comprehensive guide—you can find that at the sites I note within.

Just to spice things up, I’ll also reignite one of the twelve-thousand seventy-two things grammarians like to argue about. Whatever could that be?

Two Indiana schools—Purdue University Online Writing Lab and Indiana University (its east campus) offer sturdy advice for this sturdy punctuation mark.

At the former, a list of 11 basic rules includes these three (bolded bits mine):

• Use a pair of commas in the middle of a sentence to set off clauses, phrases, and words that are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. Use one comma before to indicate the beginning of the pause and one at the end to indicate the end of the pause.

• Do not use commas to set off essential elements of the sentence, such as clauses beginning with “that.” “That” clauses after nouns are always essential.

These two get at a pet peeve of mine. (It will shock you to learn that I have a whole herd of pet peeves.) It’s the matter of that vs. which, which—which!—is abused All. The. Time. Among the worst offenders are the Brits, those supposed Lords of Erudite Word-dom, which I find depressing or heartening depending on how I’m feeling about the Brits on any given day. You’ll have to read a future issue of mine on this topic. I could fill a book.

For now, please just memorize the nugget of those two: if the phrase is not essential, use commas. If it is—if the sentence makes no sense, or doesn’t say what you want it to say without it—do not use them. Here’s an example (mine):

The dog that barks annoys me. (I like dogs generally. I just have trouble with this one because of her barking.)

Those kittens, which are adorable, need homes. (The kittens need homes. Also, they are adorable, an extra bit of information I’m offering that, come to think of it, really isn’t necessary because it’s redundant.)

This third one I’ve chose to include here is the reason people are free to argue about commas as if their lives depended on them:

• Use commas wherever necessary to prevent possible confusion or misreading.

Indiana U’s advice comes with lots of examples, which is helpful. Here is a rule that I want to rant about—I mean, discuss.

Use commas with dates, addresses, titles, and numbers. (Note: I am only going to discuss two of these four elements. You are fortunate, because a Beatle is referenced in one of them.)

Rules for dates: In dates, the year is set off from the rest of the sentence with a pair of commas. Example:
On December 12, 1890, orders were sent out for the arrest of Sitting Bull.

Rules for addresses: The elements of an address or place name are separated by commas. Example:
John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England, in 1940.

Note that the first one includes a comma after the year, not just the month. Nobody ever does that. This is a major pet peeve of mine.

Note that the second one includes a comma after the country, not just the city. Nobody ever does that. This is a major pet peeve of mine.

The University of North Carolina is a writer’s mecca—its creative writing program is among the nation’s oldest, and since it’s in the South, it already has a leg up on the rest of us because Southern writers (and Irish writers) just Do. It’s a known fact.

So, there’s a reason its online comma advice is better. The info in this page about commas is kickier, easier to read and understand, and more comprehensive than the stuffier sites from Indiana. I like this advice:

Beware of popular myths of comma usage:

MYTH: Long sentences need a comma. A really long sentence may be perfectly correct without commas. The length of a sentence does not determine whether you need a comma.

MYTH: You should add a comma wherever you pause. Where you pause or breathe in a sentence does not reliably indicate where a comma belongs. Different readers pause or breathe in different places.

MYTH: Commas are so mysterious that it’s impossible to figure out where they belong! Some rules are flexible, but most of the time, commas belong in very predictable places. You can learn to identify many of those places using the tips in this handout.

What follows is a list of handy guidelines with headings like Introductory Bits, FANBOYS (mnemonic device for remembering coordinating conjunctions For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So, which function as connectors), the Dreaded Comma Splice, FANBOY Fakers, Interrupters, and more. Makes you curious, doesn’t it? Check it out.

I always try to browse my Mothership, Substack, for fellow writers’ letters. Mind the Gap—all about punctuation—has covered apostrophes, semicolons, and lots of chewy things about punctuation in art, world events, and more, but so far nary a word on commas, although the publisher does reference them in her cheeky “About” page:

👉🏼Do women really use more exclamation marks than men? (Spoiler alert - they do!)

👉🏼Can a full stop actually cost you your marriage?

👉🏼What does your punctuation give away about your sex life?

👉🏼How does a semi-colon make you a millionaire? (maybe!)

👉🏼And why is the comma responsible for the Russian revolution?

When I Googled that last bit, because of course I did, I found a fabulous Aeon site about the history of punctuation that aims to explore “How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling.” Included  in its discussion is the answer  to that final question, which I’ll let you discover for yourself.

Good old Grammarly, of course, has guidelines for commas. There’s even a video for folks who are more into audial and visual learning than words. (In which case, why are you reading Well Worded?) The speaker is a perky young woman with great hair and an alarming level of excitement about the comma—“That most misunderstood of all punctuation marks.” (I’m skeptical.)

A concise list will help you lickety-split when, for some weird reason, you’re not interested in getting into the weeds. But if you do want to venture deeper, it continues with more, beginning with this:

When you have a list that contains more than two elements, use commas to separate them.

Julie loves ice cream books and kittens.

Julie loves ice cream, books, and kittens.

Julie loves ice cream, books and kittens.

(The comma before the and in a list of three or more items is optional. See below, under “Serial comma,” for more information.)

Uh-oh. What is it going to say about that serial comma? Let’s find out. (I might have to rescind my positive recommendation of this site, at least when it comes to commas.)

As mentioned above, when you are listing three or more items, commas should separate each element of the list. However, the final comma—the one that comes before the and—is optional. This comma is called the serial comma or the Oxford comma. 

Whether or not you use the serial comma is a style choice. Many newspapers do not use it. Many trade books do use it. In your own writing, you can decide for yourself whether to use it—just be consistent.

That’s nice. The writer is diplomatic and employs a common—and outmoded if you ask me but you didn’t—journalism tactic of “showing both sides.” (“Newspapers v. trade books.”) OK.

But then comes the kicker, and in my humble opinion, the deal breaker:

Keep in mind, though, that occasionally the serial comma is necessary for clarity.

Exactly. This is why everybody should just suck it up and use that third comma. Why stop to consider whether or not it’s clear without it? Just use it all the time and worry about more important things.

The article offers a great example of that clarity problem:

I dedicate this award to my parents, Jane Austen and Albert Einstein.

The sentence above will almost certainly cause readers to do a double take.

Indeed, it will! For one thing, Austen would never have put up with Einstein’s shenanigans.

People who don’t use the Oxford comma, like almost every newspaper in the country and a friend of mine who is far deeper into grammar geekiness than I am, are wrong. They, and she, might be very fine and very nice—she certainly is—but they are wrong. The end.

People who battle over the Oxford comma make people who argue more broadly about when commas are necessary look like pikers.

For example, here’s a post by Greg Weatherford on his LinkedIn page. The headline is

The Oxford comma is silly, unnecessary and immoral. You're wrong to defend it.

He then gets slightly less heated in the text of his post:

I’m going to take the most controversial stance in editing—at least if you believe blog posts, flag-waving writing gurus and self-appointed grammarians.  

First, I'll demonstrate why mine is the correct point of view from every perspective that matters—logically, in terms of clarity and even, in its way, morally. 

Oh, wait. I meant the opposite of less heated.

He does follow that shark bait with this smidge of levity:

And then I'm going to show you why the whole argument doesn't matter. 

Isn’t that nice?

I don’t know what he said because at that point I stopped reading. Which means we’ll never find out why it’s... immoral? My stars!

Jarrod Partridge, another LinkedIn writer, provides excellent examples of meanings gone awry when that last comma is left out—as it happens, another most unfortunate pairing:

Dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Poor God!

But he also cites good reasons why even the Oxford comma can muddy meanings, primarily when it runs up against other comma rules about setting off phrases:

They went to Sydney with Betty, a maid, and a cook.

Three people? Or two people: a cook and a maid named Betty?

I did read far enough in this post to find this and other arguments against the Oxford that, OK, are not bad ones. But the real moral here is that when you’re mean and aggressive, people like me aren’t going to read you. (I doubt that Greg Weatherford is losing any sleep.)

With Oxford commas, non-serial commas, sexist pronouns, and 95 percent of writing in general, you can always improve clarity by reworking the sentence; again, from my man Jarrod:

They went to Sydney with a maid, a cook, and Betty.

I maintain that there will be fewer times you’ll have to do that if you use an Oxford than if you don’t. That’s why I think you should just stop worrying and learn to love the Oxford.

I leave you with a last word from Jarrod, who cites a court case that cost a dairy in Maine $5 million because of comma abuse. The company listed activity exemptions from an overtime pay statute:

The statute stated that “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution” of certain goods would be exempt from the requirement of overtime pay.

The court had to decide whether ‘distribution’ was one of the activities that were exempted from overtime pay. The missing serial comma suggested one thing, while not having a conjunction before ‘packing’ created further ambiguity. The truck drivers wanted overtime pay, and the company was obliged to settle the case for $5 million.

The US appeals Judge David J. Barron wrote, “For want of a comma, we have this case.”

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Lagniappe: Daily Overview offers just what its title says it does: Photos, changing daily, of bits of our planet from high above. Each includes a caption about what we’re looking at. I like this one because loved ones of mine live there. “Stuyvesant Town is a residential community on the east side of Manhattan in New York City. In total, combined with neighboring Peter Cooper Village, its 110 red brick buildings contain 11,250 apartments, providing homes for slightly more than 21,000 people. The development, commonly known as “StuyTown,” opened in 1942 and primarily housed veterans returning to the United States from World War II.”