XP: Written Word/English Language&Reading Material

originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Jonathan, I guess there are differences of opinion on this. A comma is often considered appropriate to indicate a pause, especially a short pause.

. . . . Pete
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Some people think the world is flat. Others think that the species were created in their present forms. Both opinions are incorrect. So is yours. I hate to sound like that, but commas were developed to clarify sentences, not to allow breath control. To return to an exchange Sharon and I had, they are there to distinguish Call me Ishmael, and Call me, Ishmael, regardless of where one pauses in either sentence. Do it your way, and you will just write ambiguous sentences.
 
Jonathan, It's not "my way". My opinion on this developed (wrongly?) from seeing so many other people (not me) espouse using a comma to indicate a (short?) pause.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Jonathan, It's not "my way". My opinion on this developed (wrongly?) from seeing so many other people (not me) espouse using a comma to indicate a (short?) pause.

. . . . . Pete
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which is why actually studying grammar is the path to discovering what correct grammar is. basing your understanding on its misuse by people that mutilate it will never teach its principles.
 
I remember the first time I heard the pause theory of commas. I was in elementary school and one of my fellow students who, since he was maybe 10, had the excuse of not knowing any better, proposed it. The teacher immediately corrected him and proceeded to start to teach us about dependent and independent clauses. I next heard it when I started out teaching in a class on College Writing. That student was eighteen and had the excuse of not having been taught grammar properly. I immediately corrected him and proceeded to teach about appositives, direct address, and I forget what else. It's a common theory among those who have not been taught grammar properly.
 
Jonathan, I have always had a very high level of education, including with grammar. Where I grew up (Midland) there was a topnotch school system. Then excellent college and graduate school. Maybe I was negligent in not having advanced to a PHD program.

In any case, perhaps it's my senior memory capacity (or lack thereof), but I can't recall ever receiving any teachings about using a comma as a pause indicator being inadvisable. (And, yes, the foregoing comma before "but" feels right.)

Thanks for the elucidation...it's always nice to learn something.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Jonathan, I have always had a very high level of education, including with grammar. Where I grew up (Midland) there was a topnotch school system. Then excellent college and graduate school. Maybe I was negligent in not having advanced to a PHD program.

. . . . . Pete
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He doth protest too much, methinks. Unbecoming at best, vaguely trumpian and decidedly un-WD-like.
 
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

Jonathan, I have always had a very high level of education, including with grammar. Where I grew up (Midland) there was a topnotch school system. Then excellent college and graduate school. Maybe I was negligent in not having advanced to a PHD program.

. . . . . Pete
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He doth protest too much, methinks. Unbecoming at best, vaguely trumpian and decidedly un-WD-like.
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yes, and a phd is not necessary to come to grips with the use of the comma.
 
Just for the record, my Ph.D. was in English literature, not composition. I studied literature, literary history and theories of interpretation. It used to be that one learned grammar before graduating high school. To judge from my students, at least up to 2015, with some woeful exceptions and some bad periods in teaching trends in public schools, that is still pretty much the case (of course, I taught at a private university with at least some admissions standards). Certainly one learns it by one's first year in college unless one can't.
 
Verse writers can create pauses by interrupting a sentence in midstream and shunting it to the next line. In prose, this is unavailable, so one can understand the desire for pause-commas. If a verse-minded prose writer wants to ensure that a particular cadence is observed by the reader, they may deploy them and incur (not deploy them, and incur,) the wrath or ire (not the wrath, or ire,) of the assembled.
 
Even verse, at least until well into the twentieth century was written grammatically. Line breaks that followed grammatical units work as a pause. But poets can do something called caesura to make you read through line breaks. One of the things I had to teach in my introduction to interpreting literature courses was to attend to the sentences in poems before they attended to the utterances created by lines first or you will inevitably misread.

Once again, if you place commas to indicate verbal pauses, you will inevitably create ambiguity in sentences that don't need to be there.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Are you really arguing that one example of misused commas not creating ambiguity proves that misuse of commas will never create ambiguity?
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Hardly. You wrote "inevitably," meaning that the pause comma always creates ambiguity, whereas I am saying not always.
 
Really? You can't tell the difference between something that will inevitably happen, sooner or later, and something that will always happen every time? If so, we should give it up. In any case, my original claim stsnds. Using commas when one feels there ought to be a pause will lead to unnecessary ambiguity, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life, even if not for every sentence you write during the rest of your life.
 
Although I am normally a stickler for correct use of commas, as a lawyer I purposefully violate the rules. I feel a little dirty every single time I do it, but lawyers knowingly use commas incorrectly to create emphasis or pauses all of the time. An example is the incorrect usage that Oswaldo highlighted. For example: “The Defendant knowingly breached the contract, and knowingly withheld payment, without any regard for the consequences.” Another common example is a double whammy: “And, he lied about it too.” Please don’t make me go on.
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
Although I am normally a stickler for correct use of commas, as a lawyer I purposefully violate the rules. I feel a little dirty every single time I do it, but lawyers knowingly use commas incorrectly to create emphasis or pauses all of the time. An example is the incorrect usage that Oswaldo highlighted. For example: “The Defendant knowingly breached the contract, and knowingly withheld payment, without any regard for the consequences.” Another common example is a double whammy: “And, he lied about it too.” Please don’t make me go on.
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we won't.
 
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