FOR WRITERS: COMMENTS ON THE COMMA

Ernest Hemingway rarely used commas, was famous for leaving them out of compound sentences. He won a Nobel Prize for Literature. (Image courtesy Nobel Website.)

Commas are the bane of writers, because their rules don’t jibe with the mechanics of writing. This is especially true in dialogue and showing thoughts, because real people don’t speak in comma-driven phrases. Fiction and nonfiction authors write in the vernacular, not in the official language of grammar police. One of the great benefits of self-publishing is writers are being liberated from the tyranny of the comma.

We writers all know and accept some very basic technical grammar rules, like a comma always goes inside a close quotation mark, not after. We’re all painfully aware of the grammar war waged over the Oxford comma; muse we use one in the next to last in a series of three or more penultimate terms? It’s those kinds of useless exercises in non-substance which we writers must avoid.

(Image courtesy Cambridge Dictionary.)

When I started writing seriously, my initial inclination was that when in doubt, use a comma. Today I hold a view totally the opposite: if a comma is absolutely necessary, due to one of the inflexible instances, or for clarity, use the comma. If it’s not a case of a comma outside a close quotation, don’t use it. Where using one in the wrong place breaks up the flow of the sentence, don’t use it. When writing dialogue or thought, view it as a reader, not a member of the grammar police.