A Dash of Style (6 page)

•You might abstain from commas in order to speed up the pace, particularly in a section where the work lags. Comma-less writing is as fast as it gets. It accelerates the rhythm, and in some instances this is necessary.

• There might be times when you want a sentence to be read as a single uninterrupted thought. In such a case, removing the comma creates the desired effect:

I checked the filter, and changed the water, and hit the button three times, and the damned thing still wasn't working.

I checked the filter and changed the water and hit the button three times and the damned thing still wasn't working.

Both of these are acceptable, but they offer different effects. The latter reads as if spoken all in one breath, and the writer might want this effect to indicate the narrator's exasperation, his letting it all out at once. It is a stylistic decision.

•The same holds true in dialogue, where the comma's impact is even more potent. You can, for example, omit commas in dialogue to indicate someone speaking all in one breath, or in a hurried manner. Consider:

"Make a right on 57th and a left on 3rd and a right on 80th and step on it because I'm ten minutes late."

This can also be used to indicate someone in the midst of a heated dialogue, who, for example, won't let the other person get a word in. Or it can be used to indicate a distracted person, or one who has no attention span and who rambles on uncensored.

• Omitting commas can help achieve a stream-of-consciousness feeling.

When one reads a long free-flowing sentence like this without any commas it gives the feeling of letting it all out uncensored which is exactly what the stream of consciousness writer is trying to achieve when crafting his work which he might consider a sort of calculated spontaneity.

Pausing is synonymous with thinking and calculation, and thus it is not surprising that the hallmark of stream-of-consciousness writing is a dearth of commas.

•You can omit commas in order to deliberately gloss over something important. Some writers like to make readers work, to not lay out everything; for them, the joy comes in forcing the reader to decipher their text. One way of doing this is to mention an important item merely as an afterthought, perhaps even sandwich it between unimportant items. Some writers aim to create sentences that, if you read late at night, you are likely to miss. They might drop bombshells this way and keep going; the story has changed and the reader does not know why, and needs to go back and reread. It is the understated approach, the antirevelation. And it can be facilitated by burying key information amid a comma-bereft sentence.

Let's look at some examples from literature. In her story "Kew Gardens," Virginia Woolf deliberately omits commas when describing the "flower-bed":

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into the heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half-way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface. . . .

This is stylized, and will be hard for most readers to digest; but Woolf must have felt that it furthered her intention, or else she would not have chosen to omit the commas. You might say that omitting the commas here allows the reader to take in the entire beauty of the flower bed in one breathless sweep.

In one of her most famous poems, "Sonnet 43," Elizabeth Barrett Browning avoids commas to great effect:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to
the
depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

Normally "depth and breadth and height" would be separated by commas; by ommitting them, Browning forces us to consider all three breathlessly, as if to further emphasize that there is no limit, or pause, to her love. Note also the varying of style here: she begins with two short sentences, the first culminating in a question mark, the second in a period, then follows with a long sentence. The variety gives us a fullness we would not have otherwise (more on this later, in the epilogue).

DANGER OF UNDERUSE

With all reward comes potential risks. If you go too far in your underuse of the comma, you run into other dangers and come full circle, back to the same problems that required you to implement the comma in the first place. A few potential pitfalls:

• On the most basic level, a sentence bereft of commas can be hard to understand. The main function of the comma is to clarify, and when commas are missing, readers can confuse one clause of a sentence with another. They will be forced to reread, to exert additional effort to figure out where the pauses should have been. For example:

With three bolts two screwdrivers one hammer and a box of nails we went to the shop my uncle Harry's that is to see what we could do with the old red Buick.

With writing like this, readers can feel as if they're being sucked into a grammatical black hole, and put the work down. It's just not worth the extra effort.

• Every sentence has a certain rhythm to it, a certain "flow." Read a sentence aloud and you'll naturally hear where you must pause. Commas are the written version of that pause; they slow the language, and suggest a pause when need be. Removing them can send readers into a tailspin; they will plunge ahead, realizing something's amiss but unable to stop until they've crashed headlong into the period. The rhythm of the sentence will be ruined, and on some level readers will feel it. For example:

She left the window open even though I told her not to and the cold air sent the old thermometer which was on the fritz to begin with into its final decline sending the heat to 96 degrees and increasing my oil bill which was already extravagant to over $1,000 for the month.

• Pauses can be necessary in the midst of dialogue. Without commas in dialogue, it reads as if a character speaks breathlessly, which can make the dialogue be interpreted differently than you had intended. You must carefully consider the weight of time in dialogue. For example:

"If you want me to come, if you really do, I'll be happy to."

"If you want me to come if you really do I'll be happy to."

Since this is contained within dialogue, neither of these are "wrong." It depends on how you'd like to convey your character's speech patterns. The former would be the most natural choice; the latter would be highly stylized, would indicate a more unusual speech, suggesting it is all uttered with one breath. This is fine —if deliberate. The problem comes when this is
not
deliberate, when a writer omits commas merely because he does not have a good ear for pauses within dialogue.

• If you'd like to convey more than one significant idea in a sentence and don't use commas for separation, you run the risk—even if grammatically correct—of the ideas blurring, and of the reader missing one or more of them. Consider:

The music had a profound effect on me and the seats gave me an entirely new perspective of the theater.

The music had a profound effect on me, and the seats gave me an entirely new perspective of the theater.

Again, both of these examples are acceptable, and both are grammatically correct. It goes back to the issue of intention. In the former example, without the comma, you run the risk of the reader glossing over the fact that the music had a profound effect on the narrator. In the latter example, the comma forces you to pause, to take that extra beat to consider the fact that the music had a profound effect on him.

• Without commas, an aside or qualification can become glossed over:

She said she'd come over if it snows to help me build a fire in the fireplace.

She said she'd come over, if it snows, to help me build a fire in the fireplace.

In the latter example, it is clear that she will only come over if it snows; in the former, the aside "if it snows" is not offset by commas and thus a reader won't pause before and after it. There is a greater chance that a reader—particularly a tired one —could gloss over it. You must decide whether that chance is worth it.

•A sentence can be perfectly acceptable without commas, yet the overall intention might be ambiguous. Inserting commas can alter meaning. Consider:

In sixteen days' time, the rebels will be here and we'll be ready to fight.

In sixteen days' time the rebels will be here, and we'll be ready to fight.

The effect is subtle. In the former example, the intention of the sentence is to describe what will happen in sixteen days; in the latter example, the intention is not time but the fact that the rebels will come at all. Something as seemingly minor as the placement of a comma can make all the difference.

"The use of commas cannot be learned by rule. Not only does conventional practice vary from
period
to period, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves. . . . The correct use of the comma -if there is such a thing as 'correct' use—can only he acquired by common sense, observation and taste."

—Sir Ernest Gowers

CONTEXT

No punctuation mark acts alone; every time you decide to employ one —especially the comma, which often allows you the choice of including or omitting it—you must take into account the effect it will have on the marks preceding and following it. For instance, when you use a comma, you lessen the effect of the period and semicolon. The comma steals the limelight. It slows the reader

dramatically, and thus the stop sign no longer has such great impact.

In a sentence like this, for example, the presence of commas drastically reduces the period's stopping power:

I went to see the doctor, the one on my corner, just for a quick visit, on my way to work.

But in a sentence like this, the period, as the only form of punctuation, wields supreme power:

I went to see the doctor on my way to work.

The comma can also take away stopping power from the semicolon and make it feel nearly superfluous:

It's hard for me to say it, but, after thinking it over all weekend, I realized, without any prodding, that I knew the answer all along, and that it was that I love her, I really do; but that doesn't mean she'll marry me.

But in a sentence like this, the semicolon wields its proper power:

I love her; but that doesn't mean she'll marry me.

Of course, in the above example the content was also radically changed, and we begin to see that punctuation and content are inherently connected: certain content is not possible with certain punctuation, and certain punctuation lends itself to certain content. For example, it is harder to fill a shorter sentence with commas. Sometimes you will set out to reduce the commas and find yourself altering the content of the sentence itself.

In the above examples, it depends on your intention. If you are more concerned with the impact of the comma than the period or semicolon, keep it. What matters is that your choice is deliberate.

You must also consider stylistic consistency. You always want to offer readers as smooth a ride as possible, and this means you don't want some sentences full of commas and others bereft. You want to establish a style and stick to it as much as possible. Consider:

We walked into the forest. We hadn't gone far and we'd already lost our way. I knew this would happen. She was wrong again, she always was, and this time I had proof, and I wouldn't let her forget it, especially next time she pretended to be an expert.

You
can
see how the final sentence, laden with commas while the others are not, stands out, feels jarring in context of the paragraph.

This is an extreme example. More subtle is the comma-to-sentence ratio. Unless you have good reason, you don't want your sentences to randomly jump from two commas to eight commas (assuming they are the same word length and their clauses are approximately the same length). Readers pick up on everything. Uneven comma placement will work on them, and jar them rhythmically.

Of course, once you've mastered this rule, you can break it, and deliberately defy consistency. Indeed, sometimes you'll want to stray from uniformity in order to achieve an effect. For example:

He thought he could grow an orange tree, and once an idea got into his head, there was no stopping him. He planted it that day, grinning like an idiot in the backyard, craving attention like he always did. God I hated him.

The first two sentences have two commas, while the last has none.

Notice the contrast, and the impact. The lack of commas signal to the reader that the final sentence is unlike the others, and therefore significant. Notice that sentence length is also affected: the number of commas present (or absent) often has a direct bearing on sentence length.

More subtle than the number of commas per sentence is
where
you place commas within a sentence —in other words, the length of your clauses. Some writers have asides or digressions that average few words. Such as:

I went to the theater, the new one, hoping to find something to distract me.

Other writers indulge their asides or digressions, allowing them to run many words:

I went to the theater, that elaborate concoction recently erected on my block to the endless annoyance of my neighbors, hoping to find something to distract me.