I’m mortified. The headline for last week’s blog had commas following close-quotation marks. I subscribe to my own blog in order to know when it has been posted. And there was my embarrassment spread across the networks of the world, shamed in front of every Facebooker and Twitterer on the planet (and whoever is tracking us from the Pleiades and beyond).
I’m an editor. I am not a technie. I’m enlivened by creative insight and made dull by the specificity of html. So Monday I write by blog and email it to my few-hours-a-month assistant who posts it to my website. (I’ve been shown how to do it, and I could figure it out on my own, but why spend an hour doing something that tends to frustrate me, when she can breeze through doing it in half the time?)
I assure you, my Reader, that I know that commas and periods go inside close-quotation marks – no matter the circumstance. (! and ? go outside if they are not part of the quote, inside if they are. In other words, is the question about the quote or is it the quote? Did you say to me, “I left the car running and now it’s gone”? I remember you asked me, “Did you leave the car running?”)
I wrote the last blog in perfect Chicago Style – which for general publication in the book industry is the standard. However, WordPress would not allow italics in a blog title (this is precisely the reason I need an assistant), even though I followed Chicago standards and italicized the names of the three books in the blog title.
My assistant did the logical thing (and had Writers Digest backing her up): she put the titles in quotes instead of italics. Unfortunately, she’s a social worker not an editor, so she did what she has seen many times (incorrectly): put the commas after the close-quotation marks.
I was mortified and let her know, poor Dear. But our relationship has survived that – and she has learned to call me if something as major as not being able to italicize a book title occurs. And we both learned one limitation of WordPress (though I understand it’s wonderful for all kinds of things) which I will respect from now on.
Now to the issue of commas.
Use a comma before the last conjunction of a string: tarragon, basil, cardamom, and curry. It rubs my eyeballs the wrong to see such commas – but besides being Chicago Style, there have been a few times in my life when I found it essential to the clarity of the sentence.
And that’s exactly what commas are about: clarity.
Yes, there are rules for using commas – but the rules were established to maximize clarity and minimize confusion or conflict. As all useful rules should. As there are times when rules hinder creativity, so there are times when clarity demands stepping outside the covers of the Chicago Manual.
I recently had a client’s wife – who was proofreading the manuscript her husband and I had been refining for months – comment that there seemed to be an awful lot of commas. And the dutiful husband referred that to me. My response was that I use commas for clarity. And since many people are subvocal readers – including him and me – I use commas to indicate the cadence of breathing for readers. Comma means: take a moment to absorb what you just read.
Sometimes a prepositional phrase is set off in commas – technically not necessary because the presence of the preposition that opens the phrase makes it an aside, and is usually added to specify a detail – to add emotional dimension or conceptual precision for the reader. Because our emotional state and our breath are inseparable. We hold our breath when we’re frightened. Our breath is shallow and quick when we’re anxious or excited. When we are soft, relaxed, or luxuriating our breath is deep and slow.
Writers can take advantage of these phenomena by using punctuation as emotional guidance for the reader. When you are building tension, use very short sentences – periods tell the reader to inhale. If we start inhaling rapidly, our emotional state heightens. Use commas to delineate the elements of meaning in a sentence. And can be a conjunction between words, or between concepts in a sentence – and if the concepts are not closely related, a comma or a dash (as I used in this sentence), or parentheses can give each concept a distinctive position.
Melodies in the Middle Ages were notated by circles on a five-line staff. In the Renaissance (I’m guessing here) the stems and flags were added to indicate the length each note should be held – thus defining the rhythm of the piece. Music is essentially pitch, timing, the tonal intervals of harmony, and timbre. In writing, the meaning of a word is comparable to pitch. Punctuation provides the timing/rhythm. Timbre appears as the richness of work choice (since we are blessed in English with an enormous vocabulary derived from two very different sources – German and Roman). Intervals of harmony come in writing not from two voices speaking at once – which would make the reader crazy – but from the relationship of sounds and the repetition of words.
Trying to read Nehru’s page-long paragraphs without punctuation would be harder than reading Ulysses because stream of consciousness invites a relaxed, receptive, flowing emotional state in the reader, while political exposition requires refined nuances of meaning.
I could riff on this for a long time…
Until next time, delight in the process.
Download PDF: DCC Writers Pardon My Commas