#comma rules

Do Now:

Imagine you are 5 pages into a book when you see an erroneous comma.

Normally, if you’re creating a compound sentence, you would only add a comma before the coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) if the second clause includes a second subject:

Correct: He forgot his keys, so he ran to the car. (He ran to his car)

That’s easy enough most of the time, but sometimes the subject is known and thus omitted from the second clause. 

Incorrect: He forgot the keys, then ran back to the house. 

Here, there shouldn’t be a comma, because I didn’t explicitly state a subject for the second clause. Old-school rules say I’m cutting off the clause from its subject, “he.”  Unfortunately, I tend to think of anything prefixed by a coordinating conjunction as an independent clause, and add the second comma. Case in point? This sentence:

Unfortunately, I tend to think of anything prefixed by a coordinating conjunction as an independent clause, and add the second comma. (There’s no “I” in the second sentence, so I should have omitted the comma)

Alternatively, consider the second sentence: 

There’s no “I” in the second sentence, so I should have omitted the comma. (Here, the second coordinating clause has its own subject, so I should keep the comma.)

Should the first example be called a complex sentence instead of a compound one? I don’t think so--that implies one clause has more weight than the other, when they’re actually pretty similar. 

Here’s a proper complex sentence: one subordinate clause, one independent clause: 

Although I love fruit, I refrained from eating at the fairy’s buffet. 

It’s clear that the second half of the sentence matters more than the first half. I could cut off the first clause and the point would still stand. That’s generally the case with SUBORDINATing conjunctions--by definition, they make one clause subordinate to the other. 

I tend to add the technically unnecessary comma to my longer sentences because the reader is unlikely to forget the subject of the sentence but can get lost in a long idea. Additionally, we tend to pause at the coordinating conjunctions, and commas often indicate pauses. 

This is usually less of a problem in my academic writing, but I hate how often it comes up in my fiction. Sometimes I fight the system and sometimes I cave by deleting the comma or adding a subject to the second sentence. 

By Alice Hello again, fellow explorers of silliness and smarts! 🎉 It’s me, Alice the Mathonaut, swinging by with my dazzling cape and cosmic calculator to throw a vibrant fiesta in celebration of my brilliant big sister Ariel and her brand-new paper that’s bursting with excitement! This incredible brain-blaster dives deep into the fascinating world of reading and writing ENORMOUS numbers—the…

Definition: a punctuation mark (,) indicating a pause between parts of a sentence. It is also used to separate items in a list and to mark the place of thousands in a large numeral. Note: Do not rely on grammar or spelling checkers to identify missing or misused punctuation. Although a checker may flag possibly missing or incorrect marks, it cannot do much else. While I still recommend using…

Karma rules????????

I spent a lot of time thinking what comma rules means here

When editing any document for my clients, the one comma-usage error that I encounter more than any other is the lack of a serial comma. While saying serial comma makes me hungry because I always think of Cornflakes when I say it, I still say it – all…the…time. Nothing drives me crazier as an editor and writer than a document, however big or small, that does not use the serial comma, also known as…