Punctuation, part II: commas, mostly

Several issues ago we published an article on punctuation that was part I of a two-part piece, though we didn't realize it at the time. Now we continue with the second part. Looking back on Part I, we saw that it covered all the easy stuff and failed to deal with the really hard part of English punctuation, the comma.

When people say they have trouble with punctuation, they're mainly thinking about commas. The other forms of punctuation are relatively easy to master, because none of them have very many different uses. Let's begin with a quick review and update of the punctuation we covered in Part I.

Semicolons, colons, and dashes
The most important concept is that punctuation exists on a hierarchy (Dawkins 533). The highest marks are the section division (often with a heading announcing a new section, or a text gap with no heading); the paragraph break; and the sentence-final mark (period, exclamation mark, and question mark). The middle marks are the semicolon, the colon, and the dash. The low marks are the comma and, even lower, the "zero" punctuation, or the space between words. Changing punctuation is mostly a matter of raising or lowering it in the hierarchy. When the punctuation is raised, the writer creates more separation and emphasis, and vice versa. The highest punctuations, the section gap, paragraph break, and period, are fairly obvious and usually give writers little trouble. The three in the middle, the semicolon, colon, and dash, are also relatively easy once a few simple rules are understood.

Semicolons join complete sentences together in a special relationship, almost a kind of question-and- answer connection. Lewis Tomas playfully but accurately demonstrates:

The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer. (103)

Naton Leslie, in his essay "Don't Get Comfortable," uses semicolons in the same precise manner:

Animals made poor targets; they were hard to find, but when found, too big and easy.

Colons signal a move from general to particular. Thus they are often used to introduce lists, for example:

When we speak of the greatest Presidents, most of us have in mind the same three: Washington, Lincoln, and F. D. R.

But the general-to-particular connection works with other kinds of statements. Leslie again:

Finally he got his own climbing gear: long hooks like bayonets that strapped to his high-topped boots and a wide leather belt to wrap around tree trunks.

My father would sometimes say, after telling one of these stories, that there's only one thing you need to know to do "high work": "Don't get comfortable."

Notice that what comes before the colon is always a complete sentence in itself.

Dashes sometimes perform a function opposite to colons, taking a sentence from particular to general. For example:

Washington, Lincoln, and F. D. R. -- these are the three Presidents most of us think of as great.

In the following example, Nicolette Toussaint uses a dash to show that "exhausted" is the cumulative effect of what comes before:

I was constantly startled, unnerved, agitated -- exhausted.

More often, dashes are used for emphasis. Usually a comma could be used in the same place, but the writer chooses to raise the punctuation for greater emphasis. Leslie:

My father doesn't say what Doc said back -- some grunt or mumble through his mustache -- but later, on Blood Road in his oxcart, Doc was jumped by three men wearing bandannas, like the outlaws they had read about in dime novels.

I've always been hesitant about heights -- not actually frightened, only concerned and reluctant about climbing, a controllable vertigo.

Commas
Commas are hard for many writers to master because they have so many different uses and some of the uses are subtle. Even highly experienced writers will sometimes vacillate, inserting a comma into a sentence, taking it out, putting it back in. As Ann Raimes puts it, "When readers see a comma, they get a signal like 'These two parts of the sentence are being separated for a reason'" (329). Good writers are concerned with precision: precision in word choices, in sentence structure and emphasis, in every detail all the way down to the little comma. Consciously or unconsciously, they think about the reasons for the commas they use.

How does one write about commas without just repeating everything in the handbooks? One is tempted to try for a Grand Unified Theory of commas that will cover all cases. Here's a try at a theory: Commas help readers see how the components of a sentence relate to one another, and thus perceive the main focus and emphasis of the sentence. The main sentence, the part that carries the essential meaning and fills the required grammatical slots, is not interrupted by commas. The only exception occurs when a nonessential modifier is inserted, as in the previous sentence. The modifier could be omitted, and the phrase "The main sentence" would not change meaning. The modifier merely clarifies it further.

In an attempt to find what the various uses of commas have in common, how they show readers how to read sentences, we arrive at three principles for thinking about when to use commas and when not to. They are not meant to substitute for the information in a handbook, nor do they completely account for highly conventionalized uses of commas, such as in dates or addresses or in the neighborhood of quotations. (Or possibly they do, but explaining how the general principles apply to each case would defeat the goal of keeping things simple. Sometimes it's easier just to memorize a few rules.) The three principles are, rather, an attempt to help make sense of what the handbooks tell us about commas as signals of the relationship among the parts of a sentence.

1. Commas should not separate required elements of a sentence (Kolln 251). Such elements are subject noun phrase, verb, object noun phrase or complement. It helps to think of a sentence as being composed of the "main sentence" or "sentence core," expanded by any number of adjectival and adverbial modifiers (a subject for another Word Works, another time). A sentence like "John's brothers bought him a balloon ride" would not be interrupted by commas because every part of it is needed to make the sentence complete; the whole thing is the main sentence. In such an uncomplicated sentence that seems obvious, but in a minute we'll look at a more complicated case.

2. Commas most often separate the less essential modifying elements from the main sentence. If we take the previous example and augment it with modifiers, we might get "John's brothers, Joe and Mike, bought him a balloon ride for his birthday." We have added two modifiers, "Joe and Mike" and "for his birthday." The first modifier is nonessential information, because John's brothers are the same people whether we name them or not. Therefore this modifier is separated from the main sentence by raising the zero punctuation to commas. The second modifier, "for his birthday," is more important information, because it states the occasion, or reason, for the gift. No comma is used.

But what if we move the second modifying phrase to the beginning: "For his birthday, John's brothers gave him a balloon ride"? That comma is optional, but most of us would probably want to create a bit of separation. We do so because "for his birthday" really belongs with the verb-object part of the sentence, and we've taken it out of its natural order. Since it is not part of the subject noun phrase "John's brothers," we raise the punctuation to a comma.

3. The "pause principle" is not reliable. Writing is not the same as speech; it isn't merely speech written down (Danielewicz and Chafe 214). In speaking, and even in reading aloud, we pause in several places, sometimes at the boundary between sentence components but also in the middle of them. So if we advise writers to "read the sentence aloud, and where you hear a pause, put in a comma," we are handing them a tool that will prompt them to add commas in all sorts of inappropriate places. To illustrate, here are two more sentences by Naton Leslie. Anyone reading them aloud would pause naturally at several places. Natural pauses are indicated by vertical lines, which we've inserted here but are not in the original. But Leslie has used commas at only a few of the pause points.

Then, as the train caused the bridge to quake and sway, my father felt his father's arm around him | and his own weight release from his arms | as his father held them both by one arm, sixty feet above the icy Allegheny.

I remember once my father was telling the story at my grandmother Harnish's house, a gathering of men in his mother-in-law's parlor | listening, among them Sam, her second husband, who in the last year had been force to sit on the couch | with an oxygen tank beside him, alternately reaching for the hose and mask | to give him the oxygen black lung denied him and bending over, panting with effort, to spit tobacco juice into a plastic bucket.

One might be most strongly tempted to put a comma between parlor and listening. But Leslie wants us to see that listening is integral to the phrase "a gathering of men in his mother-in-law's parlor listening." The men were there to listen to the story; the listening isn't just incidental to their being there.

Another way to describe the difference is that all of the pause places are phrasal pauses, breaks between natural phrases. But certain ones are also rhetorical pauses, points of particular separation and emphasis.

Punctuation is connected to a writer's "sentence sense"
Experienced writers who sometimes fret over comma placement do it not because they are not sure of the rules. Rather, they are listening to the rhythms and emphasis patterns of their sentences, trying to figure out the best way to show their readers how to play back the sentences in their heads.

Punctuation is connected to everything else in an obvious way: if there were no words, there would be nothing to punctuate. But in a subtler way, mastery of punctuation is connected to the writer's sense of what the words and sentences are doing. This statement isn't meant to imply that writers have to know sentence grammar in order to write well. There have been many studies on the connection between knowledge of grammar and the ability to write effectively. The studies have unanimously concluded that there is no such connection. But writers must have an intuitive sense of a wide variety of sentence structures, and also a sense, intuitive or acquired, of the rhetorical effectiveness of sentences.

In the early days of Western writing, the connection between words and punctuation was different from ours today. Ancient Greek and early Roman writing was generally unpunctuated; scribes did not even insert spaces between words. It was not so much that no one had thought of doing so yet. The ancient manuscripts did not represent a "primitive" stage of writing. Writing was conceived of as having a purpose different from the one we take for granted. In antiquity, readers -- who almost always read aloud to themselves or to audiences, not silently -- were supposed to be skilled at interpreting what they read. It was the job of a reader preparing to read to an audience to discern boundaries between words and groups of words. It was not the author's or the scribe's job to tell the reader how to interpret the text. Readers were expected not to "sight read" manuscripts but to carefully prepare and rehearse the reading. Punctuation marks found on ancient manuscripts were rarely provided by the authors or the scribes. They were usually added later, sometimes by teachers training their pupils to read aloud, sometimes by readers preparing themselves to read the manuscripts before audiences (Parkes 110- 11). Over succeeding centuries, reading aloud gave way to silent reading. Regular punctuation developed partly in response to this trend. The purpose became to help people read to themselves rather than to an audience.

The least productive thing a writer can do to improve punctuation skills would be to try memorizing the rules out of a handbook. Instead, they should learn how to pay attention to how their sentences are focused, how the sentence parts relate to one another. Punctuation is not just window dressing. It is an indicator of the writer's sense of sentence structure, focus, and emphasis.

RL

Works cited

Danielewicz, Jane, and Wallace Chafe. "How 'Normal' Speaking Leads to 'Erroneous' Punctuating." The Acquisition of Written Language. Ed. Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985.

Dawkins, John. "Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool." College Composition and Communication 46.4 (Dec 95), 533-548.

Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999.

Parkes, M. B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Raimes, Ann. Keys for Writers. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Thomas, Lewis. "Notes on Punctuation." The Medusa and the Snail. New York: Bantam, 1979.