The comma is a very useful punctuation mark enabling the writer to make their point much more clearly and avoid confusion. I have read passages where, due to the lack of a comma, the meaning was ambiguous.
I do not have hard-and-fast rules for commas. My guiding principle is to ask myself whether it adds to the clarity or the rhythm of the sentence. Typically I use them to separate ideas or lists of objects or, in the case of a long sentence, insert parenthetical remarks, as I just did.
But there are others who overdo it, as in the passage below. (Ignore the various typos and spacing errors because this looks like it was written in a rush and not proof-read before printing.)
Well,I decided to get up early,at my central London Hotel, and walk,my dog,until breakfast time.
No sooner had I got out the holtels front doors, my dog ,got spooked by the door man,and consequently, I stopped in my stride, causing the young man behind me ,to bump in to me.
Obviously I immediately opologized,and said” sorry my dog got spooked.
The guy bend down,to say hello to her,and she was taken by his kindness.
Most of those commas are unnecessary and make the meaning more obscure. Here is my rewrite, where I have eliminated eleven of the fourteen commas.
Well,I decided to get up early at my central London Hotel and walk my dog until breakfast time.
No sooner had I got out the holtels front doors, my dog got spooked by the door man and consequently I stopped in my stride, causing the young man behind me to bump in to me.
Obviously I immediately opologized and said” sorry my dog got spooked.
The guy bend down to say hello to her and she was taken by his kindness.
Much clearer, no? Definitely a case where less is more.
As a proofreader and copy editor, I would’ve added another comma after “said”.
But I would have also changed a bunch of spelling, spacing, and that missing apostrophe.
Possibly channelling their inner Kirk?
“Sorry, my dog got spooked.”
From my English classes many years ago, I was taught that the comma should have been left in between “her” and “and” because the second phrase has a subject. However, I wouldn’t get bent out of shape about it if it did not have it. All those extra commas in the original are annoying, to say the least.
I would say that it could have been punctuated in a number of ways, although I agree that the original use of commas was a mess.
Let’s take the first sentence alone:
I could see it as:
“Well, I decided to get up early, at my central London Hotel, and walk my dog, until breakfast time.”
The writer says he has decided to walk his dog, and then provides a location and a duration. The comma after the initial “Well” indicates that the writer may has considered doing other things with this time. The comma between “dog” and “breakfast” suggests to me that the writer has previously finished walking the dog prior to breakfast time, or until after breakfast, and on this occasion has decided that breakfast would be the appropriate end time after some consideration.
“Well I decided to get up early, at my central London Hotel, and walk my dog, until breakfast time.”
Similar to the first meaning, but in this case the “Well” without a comma suggests to me that this is the start of an anecdote for which more will be revealed later. Like a lot of jokes which start with, “A man walks into a bar…”, removing the comma from after the “Well” hints to the reader to expect more to the story.
“Well I decided to get up early, at my central London Hotel, and walk my dog until breakfast time.” Similar to the meaning of the last interpretation, but the connotation is that when the writer walks their dog in the morning they consistently quit at breakfast time. Note that at this point there is a parenthetical remark, “at my central London Hotel”, which is unnecessary in the sentence for clarity, but needed to explain the remaining part of the anecdote.
I can even remove all the commas and get an intelligible sentence
“Well I decided to get up early at my central London Hotel and walk my dog until breakfast time.”
As far as the writer’s intent, I think #2, xohjoh2n has probably gotten it right. The writer is punctuating how they would speak it.
“Well I decided to get up early at my central London Hotel and walk my dog until breakfast time.”
The writer is setting the stage for the anecdote, giving time for the listener to absorb each bit of information, even those bits which are unnecessary, before moving on to the next part.
Some people do, in fact, tell jokes this way. They are rarely allowed to get to the punchline.
Why am I going to submit this comment, when I often get this far in a comment and decide my comment is not particularly interesting or enlightening? (For the record, this comment isn’t particularly interesting.) Because I’m on vacation at a hotel in central London at the moment (sans dog), and visited Samuel Johnson’s house yesterday. So I thought it was apropos to make some comment on this thread, even if it was an uninteresting one. Cheers!
Commas save lives.
“Let’s eat Gramma!” vs “Let’s eat, Gramma!”
I would make the same changes as Pierce@1.
If the person had been more consistent, s/he would have written “sorry, my dog, got spooked,” and we would be left thinking the error was not capitalizing the dog’s name.
My thesis advisor always said, “When in doubt, leave it out.”
I would have added a comma in your first sentence, Mano, between “mark” and “enabling”.
Two main uses for commas: to separate clauses, and to indicate pauses in speech. Orthographically, a space follows a comma.
The dog-walking story may have been dictated by voice, to a machine that inserted commas in response to pauses in the dictation.
And Kirk would, have had. Periods and. Exclamation points!
Raging Bee, nope. Were that the case, I’d have expected orthograpic accuracy.
Have you ever heard the probably-apocryphal tale of regicide covered up by comma placement?
King Edward II of England had been overthrown by his wife and was held in a castle, and the time had come to murder him. So the queen told a bishop to see to it.
The bishop didn’t want any execution orders in his handwriting floating around, especially if the queen disavoawed all knowledge of such a plot. But, he had to tell the king’s keepers to get the job done.
So he sent them the following message: “Kill Edward not to fear it is good.”
He meant the keepers to see a missing comma here: “Kill Edward, not to fear it is good”.
But, if ever called out, he’d claim the comma was of course supposed to go after the next word: “Kill Edward not, to fear it is good.”
The keepers killed the king, no one called out the bishop, and he died in his bed.
IMHO, the point of writing is communication. If a coma makes things easier to understand it is better to use them. There can also be times where the coma helps indicate the mood or mental state of the character or writer. Comas can be used to indicate a train-of-thought with ideas surfacing incomplete and/or confusion.
Anything that aides communication, prose, mood, or feeling, is good.
[lorn, coma is not the same as comma]
I almost forgot: comma, comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon!
This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
jrkrideau@17- Since Rand was a staunch atheist, I guess we can assume the author was the product of parthenogenesis, not virgin birth.
When in doubt, never use more than two concepts in a compound sentence. Two short and readable sentences are better than a long and incomprehensible sentence.
One thing that helps with commas is substituting semi-colons in sentences with list and sublists (e.g. red, green, and blue; first, second, and third). And use parentheses to differentiate between things like lists and sidebars. “I talked with May (his sister)” would add clarity if there are already many commas in a sentence.
One noticeable and positive trend I’ve seen in software in recent years is how editors handle cursor movement. For decades, if you hit Control with Left Arrow or Right Arrow, it would ignore commas and go to the beginning of the word after the next space. But if you want to edit before a comma, you would have to go to the beginning of the subsequent word, then Left Arrow back character by character. Nowadays, many editors (or at least, the ones I use in linux do) place the cursor between a word and a comma. It adds time to moving forward and back word by word, but greatly reduces annoyance in editing around commas.