Constant Content

Have comma rules changed? I keep getting snagged on excessive commas to the point I'm trying to trust MSword to correct me instead of relying on what I thought was right.

Bartleby has this sentence:

He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road

which I think if I had written it would have bounced back saying there are no commas needed.

One of my rules was to put comma's in where one naturally pauses while reading. Is that wrong?

What's the scoop, is it my Canadian English background that is in the way, have I plain forgotten the rules, or have the rules slackened?

Anyone else having this problem?

The sentence is not incorrect, but it is awkward. Leaving out the commas would not change the meaning or make it ambiguous, which is the really important thing. I think use of commas is a bit subjective these days, and different people have different preferences, which makes it difficult for us. I'm like you and tend to put in lots of commas, but when I'm editing I often take them out again in cases like the one in your example (although I'd probably change the wording anyway to ...a woman with two children... which definitely wouldn't need the commas).

It's tough and subjective (which makes it tougher).

In this example, the commas offset an aside. Think of them as parentheses: He saw a woman (accompanied by two children) walking down the road. I believe that by enclosing the "accompanied by two children" part between commas, the author is telling us that this is extra information which may or may not be important depending on the rest of the story. The man mainly saw a woman; she happened to have two children with her. Had the sentence been "He saw a woman accompanied by two children walking down the road," then the sentence would have a slightly different meaning. Rather than seeing a woman who happened to have to children, he saw the entire group as a whole. At least, that's how I interpret the two versions.

One to keep in mind, no matter the fact that the commas may be grammatically correct, is that the "new" school of writing is death on comma usage. Well, at least in the good ol' USA it's that way now. My wife who has been an editor for over twenty years regularly gets told that many of her comma placements are incorrect - even if every style and writing manual in the English language says otherwise.

American publishers ran a few studies about readers, and those studies "told" them that the average reader reads at about a sixth or seventh grade reading level. So, they adopted the military acronym KISS (keep it simple stupid). For some reason, if the sentence is fine as two separate ideas, it is now an unwritten rule that to write them as two sentences.

Most editors now follow the KISS principle, and the new crop (read younger) of professionals are taught it from the get-go. It doesn't really matter if the commas are used correctly.

I completely agree about online content writing needing to be at a sixth-grade reading level. But then, some newspapers around here have been written at that level for the past 30 years. It all depends on the market.

Michael

I have been having a tough time with commas also. I am glad I'm not the only one. It seems that sometimes the editing contradicts itself. I will remove a comma and rewrite the sentence as suggested, only to be told the sentence needs a comma on my follow up submission. It is a little frustrating.