In a Comma Coma

Commas are to writing what my junior high English teacher was to my appreciation of classic literature: They seemed to mean well at first, and then I discovered how convoluted and truly menacing they were. Commas live in a world of anarchy that makes simple editing seem like the French Revolution. Do you use them in a series? Is your introductory clause introductory enough to warrant one? Do you have an appositive or just a bunch of adjectives piling up before a noun? These are just a few of the questions that will run through your mind if you stop to think about commas for too long—or at all.

Still, people tend to get very heated about commas. Once someone has decided on a “standard” rule, it’s almost as if he’s chosen a political party: If anyone tries to cross him, he’ll defend his rule to the death. This is why I’ve taken a decidedly neutral stance on the matter and chosen to follow the basic rules outlined in popular grammar books. If someone cares to debate, I’ll hear him out. But I won’t waste precious neurons in a philosophical debate between my instincts and my inclinations. I don’t know who the comma policy-makers are, but I propose they form a sort of comma UN to sort these matters out once and for all. In the meantime, here’s a summary of some basic rules to remember when it comes to commas. Where you take them from here is your own mini-revolution.

Per Garner’s Modern American Usage (simply because Bryan A. Garner seems to be the most bipartisan of the grammarians I’ve encountered), use commas in the following situations:

1. To separate items in a list of more than two: "I ate cheese, crackers, and apple slices for lunch." (Most newspapers and some magazines omit the last comma, called a serial comma.)
2. To separate coordinated main clauses: "She said they all agreed to go, and they didn’t deny it." But, "She said that they all agreed to go and that she expected nothing less." The idea here is that the comma separates two complete sentences in the first example—two subjects ("she" and "they") and two verbs ("said" and "deny").
3. To separate most introductory matter from the main clause: "When summer rolls around, I’d like to get back into surfing."
4. To mark the beginning and end of a parenthetical word or phrase, an appositive, or a nonrestrictive clause: "The contestants have plenty of chances to prove themselves to the audience. This moment, however, is the only chance they have to prove themselves to the judges."
5. To separate adjectives that qualify a noun in the same way: "He called the clunky, poorly designed technology 'absurd.'" Not to be confused with: "She thought big strong men made the best husbands."
6. To separate a direct quotation from its attribution: "Smith says, 'We've always seen a demand for alternative energy.'"
7. To separate a participle phrase, a verbless phrase, or a vocative: "Having been tied up at work all day, I finally found a moment for reflection." And, "Matt, would you mind editing this for me?"
8. To mark the end of a formal salutation in informal letters: "Dear friends, …"
   
9. To separate parts of an address: "He lives at 1234 Main St., Boston, Massachusetts."
   

And, yes, there are exceptions and further qualifications for each of these (the entry in Garner’s is almost two pages long); but what else can we expect from the comma?

Assumptions: Obviously You Know Where This Is Going

Of course.

Those can be dangerous words—and not because of any possible entendre. No, what makes of course dangerous is its implications. And its implications are found in many places that it isn't.

Surely by now you know what I'm getting at.

Of course, you're catching on to what I'm saying here.

Needless to say (then why am I saying it?), you've got the point.

But what if you don't?

I've just finished a fascinating, engaging book called "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," by Leonard Susskind. He is a renowned and accomplished physicist and, like Carl Sagan, a terrific science writer. He's able to distill incredibly complex ideas—which, really, can be accurately described only by advanced mathematics—to basic, understandable (if imperfect) analogies. I wouldn't be able to understand anything about Quantum Mechanics or String Theory otherwise.

But in "The Black Hole War," Susskind makes a writer's classic mistake: the assumption. Maybe I shouldn't have made "The Black Hole War" bedtime reading, but one night recently, I was reading an in-depth analogy about String Theory, Quantum Field Theory and black hole horizons, when suddenly: "By now you have probably made the connection with Black Hole Complementarity" (page 359 in the Little, Brown and Co. hardcover). I had? To be fair, I was with Susskind all the way, but I was most certainly not jumping ahead of him. As I was trying to wrap my mind around a description of quantum “jitters,” Susskind was assuming I’d connected his analogy to Black Hole Complementarity. I hadn’t. That's Susskind's fault—for assuming that the lay reader was keeping up with the brilliant physicist.

I'm still not entirely sure how the concepts are connected, but that's my fault. I should be reading this book in a quiet library after a triple espresso—not in bed after midnight with a purring cat on my lap.

Of course not.

So keep your reader in mind as you write, and make sure you're bringing him along with you. It's not like orally telling a story—when you see the listener's face and reactions and can gauge whether he’s following you.

But you don't want to bore readers with repetition either. It’s a fine line.

In Susskind's case, he was using the assumption as a way to move his narrative along, to signal that his analogy was connected to Black Hole Complementarity. But what he ended up doing was confusing this reader. And hurting his self esteem a little too: I was supposed to have figured out how these concepts were connected? Man, I'm not as smart as I thought I was.

Till, We Meet Again

I don't like to be proven wrong, although it does happen from time to time (read: a lot). Generally, I idiotically stake a claim about a certain grammar rule and Matt, my resident correction expert, sets me straight. A couple years ago, he taught me the truth about the word till and set me on a feverish quest to rid the world of the evil and menacing 'til, which I'd once admired with a sort of holier-than-thou naivety. I used to be pretty proud of myself when I added that apostrophe. It was as if I was telling the world, "Yes, I realize the un- is missing and so I've taken careful consideration to notate it with this glorious punctuation mark." Unfortunately, I was oh so wrong.






Here are the facts: Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition lists till as a conjunction for until; The Associated Press Stylebook actually asks that you use till or until, but not 'til; and Garner's Modern American Usage coins the word as "a bona fide preposition and conjunction" and goes on to describe how it's "neither colloquial nor substandard," although it's been treated as such for years.

That's probably much more than you ever wanted to know about till. But I hope that if this is a startling revelation for you—as it was for me—it lessens the blow a little. And, of course, if you'd rather avoid the argument altogether, simply go with until.

Hello

Welcome to The.sau.rus,

The.sau.rus is Kim Orr and Matt Ballinger; we're copy editors. To our friends, this means we're complimentary essay, term paper, college admission letter and resume proofreaders. And although we love our friends and love editing, we also like money (and live in Southern California), which is why we've decided to create a business—one that you, too, can benefit from. We also want to offer you a little free help: So please stop by and check out some of our tips for writers and editors. We hope we can provide a little insight into the perplexing world of English grammar. If you like what you see, send us your work. We'll have it back to you in a jiffy, looking like the beautiful masterpiece you intended.

Sincerely,
Kim Orr and Matt Ballinger