The Mechanics

Today's Wednesday and the day I like to write about the mechanics of writing and editing.

I thought I'd start with the pesky comma.

It seems to cause so much discussion (at an Editors' Association seminar we spent a whole afternoon on it) and people generally disagree about its use.

The current trend is to be quite minimalistic.

In other words "Don't use commas, that aren't necessary," as Graham King illustrates in his gremlin grammar example.

But different people consider different commas necessary. Obviously commas before the word 'that' are a real no-no, but what about before 'which' or 'but' or 'such as'? Well the only real answer is it depends on the sentence construction, the subject matter and the author's style.

I admit that I am a minimalist.

In any formal writing or editing I try to remove as many commas as possible without altering the meaning of the sentence. This has aggravated editors I have worked with, but it is a more modern style brought on by the space constraints of newspaper formats. In web writing as well you only have so many characters to get your point across.

In dialogue a minimalistic approach would not necessarily work. When you are bringing a character to life commas can lend a human side to their speech that isn't appropriate in a white paper, for example.

Commas can represent pauses and nuances of speech that ellipses (...) make ridiculous. (An ellipsis is supposed to represent an omission of information anyway whereas the comma pauses before or accentuates further information.)

I am not sure there are any definitive conclusions that can be made about the comma.

I love the comma.

And, for me, the fun of writing and editing is moving commas around, deciding whether they stay or whether they go and having some fun with the pesky little punctuation marks.