Commas

The rules worth knowing and the ones worth bending

I love commas. Between them and the semicolon, my writing is populated (some say overpopulated) with pauses, breaks, and spaces to breathe, sharing with the reader the pace and clarity I hope for.

Commas have more jobs than any other punctuation mark, which is why so many writers treat them like seasoning and sprinkle them wherever a sentence feels bland. In The Language of Fiction, Brian Shawver argues that real rules lie beneath it all. He focuses on four that give fiction writers the most trouble, plus a few common mistakes.

1. Two complete thoughts get a comma before the "and."

"I went to the game, and I bought a hot dog" has two independent clauses, so the comma goes in. "I went to the game and bought a hot dog" has one subject doing two things, so it doesn't. Shawver almost lost a teaching job over this one.

Writers bend it all the time, though. Drop the commas from a chain of clauses and the prose rushes forward, which is useful in a chase or a panic. Just watch for misreads. In "Jerry whacked the baseball and his father grinned," readers spend a half-second picturing Jerry hitting his dad.

2. Commas separate items in a list.

That part is simple. The Oxford comma before the final "and" has no settled standard, so pick a side and stay consistent.

The craft is in the variations. Leave out the final "and," and the list ends abruptly, with the last item landing hard. Swap every comma for "and," as in "lions and tigers and bears," and the list feels crowded and overflowing. Tim O'Brien uses both in "The Things They Carried" so his many lists never fall into the same rhythm.

3. Equal adjectives get commas. Stacked ones don't.

"The spastic, gray poodle" needs a comma because both words describe the poodle equally. "The fat German shepherd" doesn't need a comma because "fat" describes the whole phrase "German shepherd." To test it, put "and" between the adjectives or reverse their order. If it still sounds right, use the comma.

This rule also gets broken on purpose. Hemingway's "plump brown legs" skips the comma because the words are short and quick. George Saunders writes "fat little unemployed guy" without commas because the line is meant to come out in one breath.

4. Introductory phrases usually take a comma.

"In the summer of 1968, Ron was working as a cabana boy." Short openers can skip it, as in "In Rome you can get good potato chips." Keep the comma whenever readers might mistake the opener for the start of the main sentence.

Three mistakes to avoid

Don't put a single comma between a subject and its verb ("Boyd, refuses to travel"). Don't put one between a verb and its object ("Paula ate, a sandwich"). And don't pack a sentence so full of commas that it lurches along. Nineteenth-century readers tolerated that, but modern readers don't.

Shawver's last point matters most. Plenty of good writers are sloppy with commas, and you can get away with it. But careful punctuation is one of the quieter ways your work stands out from the stack.

Try this: Take one page of your draft and check every comma against these four rules. Find one place where breaking a rule would improve the rhythm.

As an aside, I must say that The Language of Fiction by Brian Shawver has quickly become my absolute favorite textbook on the rules of writing. He writes with clarity, detail, and more than a little bit of humor.

The book can be purchased at https://amzn.to/4dwZ95I