On Commas

And Right Places

Concern for commas is one of the marks of a good writer.

This has been stated many times.

Lynne Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves — from title onwards — made the grammatical point.

If you don’t control the commas, you may end up saying something odd, nonsensical or opposite to what you intend.

(Some of you may believe there is a comma missing from that last sentence. After nonsensical.)

Yesterday’s Questions to Ask When Rewriting began with —

Is this comma in the right place?

I’d like to say something about commas and right places.

The first is that, in English, as I understand it, there’s an element of indeterminacy about commas.

Or —

The first is that in English as I understand it there’s an element of indeterminacy about commas.

They are both punctuations marks and breath marks.

This also means that, in many cases, they are optional

Some writers choose to make their sentences bristle with them, some try to comb them out completely.

One of the main tasks of reading the later prose of Henry James is figuring out where he has smoothed away the punctuational commas that other writers would let stand. His sentences can feel amorphous until you work out how they should best be spoken aloud. James expects you to find your own breathing points.

Other writers make a prose style partly out of comma omission. Hemingway (following Gertrude Stein, and partly in imitation of James Joyce) gets round them by using lots of ands.

This is a good exercise if you are trying to clarify your prose and make it more readable and flowing and not to obstruct the reader in any way at all —

Rewrite two pages of one of your stories but don’t allow yourself to use a single comma.

(There is a single comma in my novel Patience.)

Comma-aversion begins the idea they are a pedant’s punctuation mark. If you use them overmuch, this notion goes, you’re going to come across as picky, indecisive. Because everything new you say comes across as a correction of something else you’ve already said. Sub-clause after sub-clause. Marcel Proust or Jacques Derrida in full effect. And when is it ever going to touch solid ground?

Perhaps some America writers have even seen commas as a European constriction, intended to curtail freedom of expression. Europe is not a right place.

oh give me land lots of land under starry skies above

don’t fence me in

Let your sentences flow on, as Whitman’s or Ginsberg’s do, unrolling into warm unconstrainedness. (Not that either are comma free.)

Certainly, if you go from Hemingway straight to Jane Austen, or early Henry James, you’ll get the sense that commas are being used to make moral points.

Pause here, their commas say, and note the error or stupidity of this character.

There is a virtue to being precise, and being messy never led anyone to grace.

That’s the sense precise punctuation can give.

The breath follows the grammar rather than the other way round.

Lots of commas or no commas — this isn’t either/or.

You have the choice a dozen times a page.

And this is how rewriting can often end up being a matter of commas.

There’s an old piece of writing wisdom that you know a story is finished when you’ve spent this draft taking out all the commas you put in last draft.

A good writer needs to know enough about grammar, rhythm, choice and voice to be able to include or exclude — to use — commas in their own distinctive way.

But they need to be aware that there are attitudes to take, or perhaps sides to choose.