Leave the commas alone!

Karen.Hall — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:16:00 GMT

Yes, it is that time of semester - round one of marking. And while I've come across the usual range of problems - from the inability to write a complete sentence, to not-Earth logic that makes my head hurt, and footnotes and in-text referencing in the same document - the theme for this year is hideously high levels of comma abuse.

Some basic facts everyone should know about commas:

They are pretty. That is not an excuse for sprinkling them throughout your writing for no purpose other than ornamentation.
When you have ten or more commas in a sentence, they are not going to help the reader make sense of your writing. Lose some commas or break up the sentence. Or just don't go there to start with.
When using commas to insert a clause into a sentence, put the second comma in! Single commas can get lonely!
Subsituting a comma for a full stop doesn't work.
Nonetheless, commas do help the reader to understand what the hell you are on about, so use them when they are needed.

If this keeps up I'm going to start a Royal Society for the Protection of Commas (RSPC) along the lines of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

Life in Thesis-land : punctuation fetish

Leave the commas alone!