Still More About the Comma

Some of you have requested more on comma use. First, I'd like to take a minute to review sentence types. Then we'll see how you can use commas to improve clarity in your writing. There are simple sentences such as "I went home for my vacation." This sentence has one independent clause. A clause is any group of words with a subject and a predicate. There are several types of clauses: noun clauses, adverb clauses, adjective clauses. Okay, why is this important?

When sentences become longer and more complex, they may contain "independent clauses." A compound sentence contains one or more independent clause.s These are clauses that are linked to the main subject by a linking words such as "and, or, but, yet, so, for, nor". They are introduced by a comma.

A penny saved is a penny earned, but the earnings don't amount to much.
Reference:
Dodds, Jack & Judi Jewinski. The Ready Reference Handbook. (1998). Canadian ed. Toronto: Prentice Hall, 89.

Notice in the sentence above that all the information in the second half of the sentence could be divided into a separate sentence by removing the word "but" and putting in a full-stop or period.

This is not the case for a dependent clause. The following sentence is a complex sentence that contains an independent clause and a dependent clause. See that the first half of the sentence could not stand on its own as a sentence by small editorial changes.

When the hurricane altered its path, emergency bulletins were posted on the Miami TV channels.

Again, we see that comma use here introduces main clauses such as:
"Emergency bulletins were posted..." .

Dodds and Jewinski (see above) suggest the following way to identify punctuation problems. First, does your writing sound choppy when you read it aloud? Second, does your punctuation cause you to stumble or misread sentences? In these cases, you need to rewrite your sentence by either removing commas to reduce choppiness or adding commas to improve clarity.
Until next time.

KB