The Shape of Days

I wasn’t feeling in the bloggy mood this morning (see last night’s entry), but then I ran across this post at Lifehack about punctuation.

Now, punctuation is important. I’m a big fan of punctuation. But sometimes what’s as important as knowing when to punctuate is knowing when not to.

Yesterday a coworker, who’s an outstanding writer on her own, asked me to proof a document she was working on. I think it’s because she was in a hurry and felt like she needed a quick sanity check to make sure she hadn’t fuzzed out and written something nonsensical. That happens to all of us sometimes.

Most of the things I found were totally nitpicky: publication titles should be underlined, use a dash here instead of a hyphen, that kind of thing. But one sentence really needed a rewrite. I can’t remember what it said exactly, so I’ll simulate it here.

Furthermore, on January 1, 2007, John Smith, author of Blonk, said that we’re all idiots.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that sentence. It’s grammatically pristine, with every punctuation mark precisely where God ordained it should be.

And reading it is like driving too fast over a series of speed bumps.

I suggested that she rewrite the sentence. Something like this:

Furthermore, Blonk author John Smith said on January 1 that we’re all idiots.

It’s a matter of personal taste. There’s absolutely no rule in grammar or usage that says her sentence was wrong and mine was right. She correctly used a comma after an introduction, to set off an adverbial phrase and to sequester two appositives.

And therein lies the trouble with commas. We use them for so many things, sometimes merely by being there they can impede the clarity of an otherwise simple sentence. In this case, she had an appositive inside an adverbial phrase, adjacent to an introduction, followed by the subject which in turn was itself followed by another appositive. Totally grammatically correct, totally confusing.

Which brings me to the Lifehack post in question. Rule number one says that a comma should always follow an introductory element. But that’s not really accurate. Whether to use a comma after an introduction depends on how closely the introduction is linked to what follows it. For example:

Of course, we’ll have jam on our toast.

Or:

Of course we’ll have jam on our toast.

In the first instance, the introduction is only loosely associated with what follows. The introduction could be omitted entirely without changing the meaning or sense of the sentence. It’s easy to imagine that the introduction is only there to place what follows in parallel to or (ironically) in opposition to what came before.

Tea will be served promptly at four o’clock. If weather permits, we will be seated on the veranda. Of course, we’ll have jam on our toast.

Or, if you prefer:

The veranda burned to the ground last winter, so we’ll have to sit on the ground. There will be no actual tea in our tea, since the cook passed on a week ago Tuesday. Of course, we’ll have jam on our toast.

But if the introduction is a semantically significant part of the sentence, no comma should be used to offset it.

I don’t know what she was thinking. It was a ridiculous question. I mean, really. Of course we’ll have jam on our toast!

I’m going to skip over rule number two, since it’s more of a guideline than a rule anyway. But rule number three is noteworthy. “Items in a series should be separated with commas,” it says. What it omits is “unless separated by conjunctions.” The poets all understand this. They know there’s a distinct difference between “wine, women and song” and “wine and women and song.” Our grade-school teachers hammered the serial-comma rule into us so hard that we sometimes grow up with a deep-seated aversion to the serial conjunction. But like anything else, the serial conjunction is an important tool of communication when used correctly. Hell, even Dorothy understood this.

It wasn’t a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you and you were there.

More than just mimicking the speech patterns of a little girl from Kansas with a serious head injury, this use of the serial conjunction demonstrates its effectiveness perfectly. The conjunctions are cumulative. She’s not saying that four people were there. She’s saying that he was there, and he was there, and he was there, and he was there too! It just gets more and more remarkable as the sentence goes on.

I’m going to give the Lifehacker article a pass, though, because it has the courage to bring up the semicolon. That takes guts in an article on modern punctuation, even when that same article takes the coward’s way out on comma overuse.

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