We're watching your comments for correct comma usage.

May 26, 2012 9:55 PM

"Who knew people were so interested in commas?" Ben Yagoda has written three NYT pieces on correct comma usage: Fanfare for the Comma Man, The Most Comma Mistakes, and Some Comma Questions.
posted by hypotheticole (62 comments total)

So, comma, my old foe, we meet again!

The best and worst comma advice I had as a kid was to insert them in where people would pause while reading aloud.

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

I'm insert the final comma, because the name is an additional bit of info.
But who am I to argue with the NYT?
posted by Mezentian at 10:11 PM on May 26, 2012

,
posted by the theory of revolution at 10:14 PM on May 26, 2012 [2 favorites]

Only copy editors need to care about this sort of thing. I'm saying this as a copy editor.

All the rest of you, we do know what you mean, and you are not paid to worry about commas. Please focus on that cancer cure or whatever.
posted by Camofrog at 10:18 PM on May 26, 2012 [18 favorites]

One I always had trouble with. Which of these is right?

A, B and C
A, B, and C

The style book says the latter one, but it always felt wrong to me somehow.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:23 PM on May 26, 2012

One I always had trouble with. Which of these is right?

A, B and C
A, B, and C

The style book says the latter one, but it always felt wrong to me somehow.

Pickle, that is the infamous Oxford comma, and its key purpose (as far as I am aware) is to prevent ambiguity. If there is no ambiguity about what you mean whether you have to comma or not, take your own pick.
posted by solarion at 10:29 PM on May 26, 2012 [3 favorites]

We're watching your comments for correct comma usage.

♫♪ Comma comma comma comma comma Orwellian... ♫♪
posted by Rhaomi at 10:36 PM on May 26, 2012 [24 favorites]

There was a fair bit of cleverness in an earlier discussion on the Oxford comma.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 10:38 PM on May 26, 2012

I have to say, the comma/common pun was mildly amusing the first time, but using it in three consecutive headlines?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:14 PM on May 26, 2012

"Pickle, that is the infamous Oxford comma, and its key purpose (as far as I am aware) is to prevent ambiguity. If there is no ambiguity about what you mean whether you have to comma or not, take your own pick."

Right. There's some great discussions of this on Language Log and elsewhere that amounts to many, many, many examples which demonstrate that a hard rule (either way) will result in ambiguity in some cases and the only thing that makes any real sense is to chose the usage in each specific case which is less ambiguous. The end. (However, I'm pro Oxford Comma and believe that, on balance, the American prohibition against it causes much more ambiguity than it removes.)

Yagoda's job is to be prescriptivist, but he's fairly well-regarded by the descriptivist LL crowd (and that's because he doesn't really attempt to justify prescriptivism in the dumb and almost always factually incorrect ways that prescriptivists usually do — he mostly just says this is a kind of prestige dialect of English and here is its conventional usage). That latter parenthetical notwithstanding, these three columns slightly rubbed me the wrong way as they do seem to sometimes argue that some of his prescriptivist rules make inherent sense and are not just convention. Um, that's not to say that in some cases they don't actually make sense; it's that in some cases he justifies things that I don't think are inherently justifiable.

But, obviously, I'm much inclined to a liberal usage of commas. So I would be somewhat hostile, wouldn't I?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:39 PM on May 26, 2012 [4 favorites]

Only copy editors need to care about this sort of thing. I'm saying this as a copy editor.

Yeah, that's what I used to think. Then I saw a comment on slashdot, a guy said this is how he reads comments containing grammar errors.

This comment states that [err] xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx. xxxxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx. xxxxx x xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxx.

Yes, I do that too. Yes, I could probably figure out what you meant. Oh hey there's a grammatically correct comment just underneath yours. I'll read that instead.
posted by charlie don't surf at 12:33 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Then I saw a comment on slashdot, a guy said xxxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx.

Sorry, what was that?
posted by fleacircus at 1:25 AM on May 27, 2012 [7 favorites]

I can't take him seriously when he gets a simple sentence like this incorrect:

"Baseball’s home run leader, Barry Bonds, will be eligible for the Hall of Fame next year.

The correct form is:

"Baseball’s home run leader, Barry Bonds*, will be eligible for the Hall of Fame next year."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:54 AM on May 27, 2012 [18 favorites]

I find this post goes well with The Over-thinking Person's Drinking Game post.
posted by Mezentian at 2:22 AM on May 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

The style book says the latter one, but it always felt wrong to me somehow.

That's a comma misconception....(ok, ok I'll get my coat...)
posted by MajorDundee at 3:32 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

He uses em dashes with spaces. Both the Chicago Manual and the Oxford Guide reject that formatting and state that it should be like this:

I love—yes, love—the em dash.

So there.
posted by miss tea at 3:55 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm insert the final comma, because the name is an additional bit of info.

I would do that if I were addressing Jessie, but not otherwise.


♫♪ Comma comma comma comma comma Orwellian down doobie-doo down down... ♫♪
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:17 AM on May 27, 2012

♫♪ Comma Police...this is what you get when you mess with us... ♫♪
posted by drlith at 4:29 AM on May 27, 2012

If there is no ambiguity about what you mean whether you have to comma or not, take your own pick.

Just use comma sense.
posted by hal9k at 5:00 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Comma Feel The Noise.
posted by escabeche at 5:18 AM on May 27, 2012

Comma chameleon...
posted by lotusstp at 5:41 AM on May 27, 2012

MetaFilter reference alert: the third article in this post links to another Yagoda article in Slate on logical punctuation which in turn references MeFi as an example of the internet hewing toward logical punctuation:

The British style also rules on message boards and bulletin boards. I scanned four random posts in Metafilter.com (about Sony Playstation's hacking problems, the death of Phoebe Snow, the French police, and cool dads) and counted nine comments with periods and commas outside, seven inside.

Comma baby light my fire.
posted by The Michael The at 5:44 AM on May 27, 2012

^♫ comma comma
comma comma
comma it's such a joy
comma it's such a joy
comma and take it easy
comma and take it easy
take it easy
take it easy
everybody's got something to hide
'cept for me and my comma
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:57 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

The comma is the punctuation mark whose usage you can be most cavalier with but it's still possible to use it horribly, or in a way that completely changes the meaning of a sentence.
posted by Decani at 5:58 AM on May 27, 2012

it's still possible to use it horribly, or in a way that completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

Let's eat grandma.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:07 AM on May 27, 2012 [7 favorites]

I'm making some good commations
They're excellent punctuations

Good, good, good, good commations!
Ex, cel, lent punctuations!
posted by Dumsnill at 6:24 AM on May 27, 2012

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

I'm insert the final comma, because the name is an additional bit of info.

Either you are addressing Jessie directly, or Jessie is your only friend. Also there's a comma missing after "Paris."
posted by headnsouth at 6:41 AM on May 27, 2012

Headnsouth, I think there are actually no commas in that sentence.
posted by snofoam at 6:46 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

The comma is the punctuation mark whose usage you can be most cavalier with but it's still possible to use it horribly, or in a way that completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

Famously here. No doubt there are more recent examples.
posted by IndigoJones at 6:47 AM on May 27, 2012

Fuckin' a man.
posted by Edogy at 6:49 AM on May 27, 2012 [3 favorites]

Commas are so small and so easy to abuse. The most egerious comma abuse I've seen is on Facebook (of course), with one guy using commas as periods. Yes. That is what you think it is.

Beyond that, I don't really pay attention to commas unless I'm reading an uber-tangled sentence with digressions and asides.

I think people confusing "your" with "you're" ought to be a matter of greater concern, but I spent a great portion of my childhood poring over irregular verb forms.
posted by lineofsight at 6:53 AM on May 27, 2012

The best and worst comma advice I had as a kid was to insert them in where people would pause while reading aloud.

That's pretty much how commas were used in the C18th and earlier C19th and no one seemed to get too confused. These things are all just matters of convention; which isn't to say that it's not worth learning the conventions.
posted by yoink at 7:19 AM on May 27, 2012

Yeah, that's what I used to think. Then I saw a comment on slashdot, a guy said this is how he reads comments containing grammar errors.

Speaking as someone who used to do this: the problem with this attitude is that writing website comments are not something we should be obsessing too much about. No one is paying us for these things; we're supposed to be participating for our own enjoyment. Put just the energy into the form of the piece as its reach deserves. Life is too short for anything else.

I've relaxed a bit about grammar usage in my own MeFi comments lately. I try to get it obviously right if I notice it (and sometimes I feel personally embarrassed when I write a comment quickly enough that afterwards I look at it and notice that, somehow, I've said "their" instead of "there" or "they're" twice, which happened a few days ago), but in the end it's a single comment out of thousands, it's not like MetaFilter has an edit window, and it's really not that important.

I've come to view discounting what someone says because of the occasional grammar or spelling error as a case of what Jesus would respond to with "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." If you reject a statement entirely due to its form, you are systematically depriving the person you're listening to, and yourself, of that voice. And once in a while it turns out to be really important that you hear it.
posted by JHarris at 7:23 AM on May 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

Another copy editor here. Whenever I doubt myself, it's almost always related to comma usage. After puzzling out whether one should be added or taken away, I often decide to rewrite the sentence. If it is so confusing to me that I'm not sure where a comma belongs or doesn't, it is probably a terrible sentence that would stump the average reader.
posted by Felicity Rilke at 7:27 AM on May 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

The best and worst comma advice I had as a kid was to insert them in where people would pause while reading aloud.

That's pretty much how commas were used in the C18th and earlier C19th and no one seemed to get too confused. These things are all just matters of convention; which isn't to say that it's not worth learning the conventions.

I totally agree, of course, that it's all just a matter of convention. But when I was in school, my teachers chastised me for not following 20th-Century convention. I didn't understand how to place commas "correctly," and my teachers were no help. They kept saying the "insert them where you would pause when reading aloud" thing. This totally confused me. I remember spending hours reading my sentences aloud, trying different pauses, and realizing that I could justify a pause almost anywhere.

"I want some cheese."

"I want some [pause to think of what it is I actually want] cheese."

"I want some, cheese."

I guess what my teachers meant was "Pause where you'd pause if you were reading out loud, but, in general, discount 'psychology-based' pauses. Read the sentences as neutrally as possible and just focus on the rhythmic pauses." Or something like that.

I also got confused, because teachers told me to put commas before conjunctions leading an independent clause, but that sometimes clashed with the 'pause when read aloud' rule."

"I ate dinner, and he slept."

I realized that I COULD say "I ate dinner [pause], and he slept," but I also could (and did) say sentences like this with the pause between "dinner" and "and" being no longer the pause between "ate" and "dinner."
posted by grumblebee at 7:42 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine does television news, and when he posts on Twitter or Facebook, he puts commas in, where he would pause, for dramatic effect, when reading, the news. It's the kind of thing, that drives me, crazy, like listening, to Shatner, talk.
posted by stargell at 7:58 AM on May 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

They kept saying the "insert them where you would pause when reading aloud" thing. This totally confused me. I remember spending hours reading my sentences aloud, trying different pauses, and realizing that I could justify a pause almost anywhere.

I did some of that same kind of overthinking as a kid, and it never failed to confuse me and cause problems. For any of the simple (or simplistic) grammar and punctuation rules, you can easily find counter examples in great literature, where an author in control of his/her language has chosen to take another path. It caused me no end of grief that I never understood that school grammar classes were about the simplistic rules, period; my looking for the complications, contradictions, and being curious about the underlying issues was a big problem.

So I still don't know most of the simple rules, but instead do my writing more by ear, trusting that what sounds right is what will be, if not narrowly "correct," at least easily understood.

He uses em dashes with spaces. Both the Chicago Manual and the Oxford Guide reject that formatting and state that it should be like this:

I love—yes, love—the em dash.

So there.

Along with writing by ear, I write by eye, and aesthetically I think that having spaces to each side of an em dash looks better. So unless I was needing to follow a particular internal style guide, I'd opt for the spaces every time just because I like it better. Literally a case of different folks, different strokes, no?
posted by Forktine at 8:01 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

He was born on March 4, 1972, in Nashville, Tennessee, at a young age.

This made me giggle.
posted by Ducks or monkeys at 8:06 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Speaking as someone who used to do this: the problem with this attitude is that writing website comments are not something we should be obsessing too much about. ...we're supposed to be participating for our own enjoyment.

I feel like that logic is backward. "Participating" includes reading just as much as writing. (More, really.) I don't enjoy reading bad writing. If a user genuinely enjoys crazily inserting commas, or refusing to capitalize, or spending a thousand words to express a simple concept, then so be it...but I don't enjoy reading those things, so I skip them. This is just a website; I'm not paid to read every word.

So I agree with your premise, but I think you've applied it backward. I also think there's a fundamental disconnect between that premise ("this is just a website, it's just for fun") and the idea that there's likely to be anything written here that is "really important that [we] hear."
posted by cribcage at 8:07 AM on May 27, 2012

Teaching commas to first graders is often hilarious. Every, year, I, get, at, least, one, person, who, decides, that, practice, makes, perfect. "And" "then" "we" "learn" "quotation" "marks."
posted by Huck500 at 8:20 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

The rule about using the comma if it's the only brother/son/cousin/whatever is a running joke where I work.

Someone will write something like, "He learned from his deadbeat brother that their one-legged aunt had embezzled the funds."

An editor, seeking more detail, will then ask for the names: "He learned from his deadbeat brother KOMING that their one-legged aunt KOMING had embezzled the funds."

Then a fact-checker will fill in the names: "He learned from his deadbeat brother Bob that their one-legged aunt Martha had embezzled the funds."

Then a copy editor, mindful of the comma rule, will ask: "He learned from his deadbeat brother Bob [query: only deadbeat brother?] that their one-legged aunt Martha [query: only one-legged aunt?] had embezzled the funds."

So the fact-checker gets to call the subject back and ask him: "Is Bob your only deadbeat brother? Do all of your aunts except Martha have both legs?"

Then, and only then, is the sentence fit to be published.

It can also get a little sad. I wrote a reminiscence of my childhood in which I said, "My friend Tom and I went to see The Shakiest Gun in the West." I got a call from a checker, doing the due diligence, asking whether, when I was a kid, Tom had been my only friend.
posted by stargell at 8:27 AM on May 27, 2012 [5 favorites]

Either you are addressing Jessie directly, or Jessie is your only friend

Jessie is a friend. Yeah, I know he's been a good friend of mine. But lately something's changed that ain't hard to define; Jessie's got himself a girl and I want to make her mine.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:31 AM on May 27, 2012 [11 favorites]

I remember spending hours reading my sentences aloud, trying different pauses, and realizing that I could justify a pause almost anywhere.

Were you using William Shatner's voice? Cause that could be a...problem.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:47 AM on May 27, 2012

Commas are infuriating because it's often just a stylistic disagreement.

The anti-Oxford-comma camp is the one that really bugs me, though. An Oxford comma always works, while leaving out the last comma is sometimes confusing. In other words, it's dumb to leave the last comma out.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:48 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

I love—yes, love—the em dash.

AP style calls for a space on either side of an em dash.
posted by me3dia at 9:59 AM on May 27, 2012

Instant Comma's gonna get you....
posted by jonmc at 10:01 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

So the fact-checker gets to call the subject back and ask him: "Is Bob your only deadbeat brother? Do all of your aunts except Martha have both legs?

This is why I quit being a fact-checker.

He uses em dashes with spaces. Both the Chicago Manual and the Oxford Guide reject that formatting

m3dia beat me to it. This is a common newspaper style. Personally, I think it's a passive-aggressive admonition to quit using so many em dashes. They're a waste of space, and seriously, you're not saying anything that profound. The classic journalist rule is that you get three lifetime uses of exclamation points, but I think we could expand it to, say, 10 em dashes. People are addicted to those things.
posted by purpleclover at 10:05 AM on May 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

One I always had trouble with. Which of these is right?

A, B and C
A, B, and C

Ben is sent to the office for running in the school hall, but he has top marks in English and gets off. Why? The school rules clearly state, "Fighting, swearing, running and chewing gum are forbidden. Ben admits to running in the hall, but he gets off because he wasn't chewing gum at the time.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:18 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

More likely, Ben gets detention. There are indeed instances where absence of a serial comma may create confusion, but far more often serial-comma complaints are rule-based, not clarity-based. And the "rule" is imaginary.

Also, Ben's silly argument that the school rules should be read to imply some type of asyndeton prompts his teacher to look closer at his English assignments. It is discovered that Ben was plagiarizing his work, and he is expelled.
posted by cribcage at 10:42 AM on May 27, 2012

Inna Comma Da Vida, Baby...
posted by jonmc at 11:28 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

It caused me no end of grief that I never understood that school grammar classes were about the simplistic rules, period;

A better way to teach this stuff is to start with simple rules, by totally honest with your students that they're simplifications, and then, later, get into exceptions.

The (unacknowledged) simple-rules thing kept me from enjoying poetic meter for years. I remember being told that in blank verse, the stress is on the second syllable of each foot, as in

in SOOTH | i KNOW | not WHY | i AM | so SAD.

What specifically confused me is that people (teachers, books, etc) kept claiming that's where the stress falls if you say the sentence "naturally." Yet it was clear to me that you could, for instance, stress "so" in the last beat, and that would be just as "natural" (would make just as much sense) as not stressing it. It would change the meaning, but the meaning without "so" stressed wasn't somehow more meaningful than the meaning with "so" stressed.

I would have totally gotten it if someone had just said, "Blank verse is a game in which you try to write lines that can be naturally read in the tee-TUM, tee-TUM, tee-TUM, tee-TUM, tee-TUM form. There might be other ways you can read the lines that sound natural, but you should be able to give it tee-TUM reading, too. That way, readers who enjoy that rhythm can read it that way."

It would have also helped if, after I'd totally gotten the rhythm, how to read it, and how to write it, the teacher had help me explore variations, such as ...

NOW is | the WIN | ter of | our DIS | con TENT

... and to discuss ambiguities, such as the fact that a stricter on-meter reading ...

now IS | the WIN | ter of | our DIS | con TENT

... also makes sense: Now is the winter of our discontent v.s Now is the winter of our discontent. (The former implies someone previously said "now isn't the winter of our discontent.")

The honest way to teach writing, whether poetic or not, is to admit that there's wiggle room, and that rules are rules-of-thumb, not laws. And that while some variations make total sense, others are foolish, because they confound meaning or rhythm. Other choices will necessarily be right or wrong, dependent on one's personal aesthetics.

There's a weird belief amongst educators that you can't teach ambiguity -- that you must simplify (e.g. lie). That's not true. You sometimes have to start with a simplification, but there's no need to end with one. And there's definitely no need to pretend that a simplification is not a simplification.
posted by grumblebee at 11:50 AM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I would bet good money that a poll of software developers would reveal the vast majority to be supporters of logical punctuation. Once you get used to thinking of the characters inside the quotation marks as "the string, the whole string, and nothing but the string", it's really hard not to apply that logic everywhere.
posted by spitefulcrow at 3:16 PM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I would bet good money that a poll of software developers would reveal the vast majority to be supporters of logical punctuation.

This reminds of the day I heard on the radio that all subway stations between Atlantic Avenue and 14th Street were closed. I needed to get to Atlantic Avenue, and I realized I had no idea what the announcer meant by "between." Did he mean inclusive or exclusive? Were Atlantic Avenue and 14th Street closed or just the stations between them. (When we say only kids between eight and ten are allowed on this field trip, we generally don't mean just nine-year-olds.)

I asked on Facebook and discovered that about 50% of people assumed Atlantic and 14th were included and the other half assumed they were excluded. But most agreed they never would have thought about the confusion if I hadn't brought it up.

It struck me that there's a less of a difference between the inclusive and exclusive folks than there is between both of those groups and me. If they needed to get to Atlantic, they would either just go (and maybe be surprised to find out it was closed) or stay home (and maybe later get pissed off, discovering that the station was open all along). Meanwhile, I was stymied into inactivity. I simply couldn't parse the radion-announcer's statement at all.

I put this down to the fact that, as a programmer, I have to think every day about the distinction between greater-than or greater-than-or-equal-to.

There's a chicken-egg problem here: do I think of these things because I'm a programmer or did I become a programmer because I think of these things? I've always been literal-minded. Programming has increased that tendency.
posted by grumblebee at 5:09 PM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my friend Jessie.

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Jessie didn't know about my friend.
I took Jessie to a movie.
Jessie is not my friend.

I saw the movie twice, and now I have to tell my friend about Jessie.

This could get complicated.
posted by mule98J at 5:37 PM on May 27, 2012

I must remember to always refer to my wife, Lisa and never to my wife Lisa.

That is, until she gets a sister-wife.
posted by grumblebee at 5:45 PM on May 27, 2012

You could, perhaps, overuse commas, but I, personally, see little, if any, harm in it. On the other hand underuse can sometimes lead to having to rescan a sentence several times in order to extract the full essence of a sentence or to disambiguate its import particularly in the case of long constructions.
posted by Twang at 7:09 PM on May 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have learned a lot about grammar from MeFi! My coworkers and I do argue about commas. I have a question, maybe someone can answer it. When you have a sentence that starts with a date that something is occurring, does there need to be comma right after the date?

May 26th-28th, shoppers will receive 10% off their purchase.

Is that comma necessary? I can't explain why except it just "seems" right - but I'm not a formally trained copy editor, just a casual member of the grammar police.
posted by radioamy at 9:25 PM on May 27, 2012

May 26th-28th, shoppers will receive 10% off their purchase.

Is that comma necessary?

Add a word like "on" to make it a complete sentence, and then you can see why the comma works:

On May 26th, shoppers will receive...
posted by Forktine at 7:05 AM on May 28, 2012

(clicked "post" too fast)

But you can start with a date with no comma, no problem:

May 26th is when shoppers will receive....
posted by Forktine at 7:06 AM on May 28, 2012

Forktine, what about when the date is a range?
posted by radioamy at 8:13 AM on May 28, 2012

He uses em dashes with spaces.

Dijkstra —a famous computer scientist, idiosyncratic but logical— used to put spaces on only the "outer" side of his em-dash-delimited parenthetical remarks.
posted by stebulus at 9:26 AM on May 28, 2012

Forktine, what about when the date is a range?

From May 26th through 28th, shoppers will receive...

May 26th through 28th are the dates when shoppers will receive...

May 26th to 28th, shopping days that shall live in infamy...
posted by Forktine at 9:53 AM on May 28, 2012

The comma is the punctuation mark whose usage you can be most cavalier with but it's still possible to use it horribly, or in a way that completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

Famously here. No doubt there are more recent examples.

Oh yes: The case of the million dollar comma.
posted by dust of the stars at 11:35 PM on May 28, 2012