A Dash of Style (5 page)

He raised his rifle, cocked it, adjusted his neck, and had the deer in his sights, but when he went to pull the trigger his hand started shaking again, just like it had every day for the last two weeks, or maybe three, he couldn't be sure.

• The comma can be used to indicate a passing of time, particularly in creative writing. This is something I rarely see employed well. Consider:

John thought about that and said . . .

Although technically correct, we don't feel a pause here between John's thinking and his speaking. But if we add a comma:

John thought about that, and said . . .

Now we feel the moment. It is subtle, but a well-placed comma adds just enough time in a scene to make a difference, one that works unconsciously on the reader.

Consider this example from Jean Toomer's short story "Blood-Burning Moon":

Up from the skeleton walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came.

The commas here, particularly since they encapsulate such long clauses, make us really pause, make us feel the approach of dusk.

Lynne Truss addresses this point with an apt story in
Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
"Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: 'Why did you have a comma in the sentence, "After dinner, the men went into the living room"?' And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. 'This particular comma,' Thurber explained, 'was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.'"

• The comma can alter the very meaning of a sentence. Consider:

The windows with the glass treatment are holding up well.

The windows, with the glass treatment, are holding up well.

In the latter sentence it's understood that the windows are holding up well
because
of the glass treatment; in the former, it can be understood that the windows, which were created with a glass treatment, are holding up well in general. The entire meaning of the sentence changes, simply due to the comma placement.

• The comma can be used to offset a clause or idea, to allow it to stand out when it might otherwise be lost. Consider:

Taking medicine and eating well coupled with exercise can help assure a healthy life.

Taking medicine and eating well, coupled with exercise, can help assure a healthy life.

In the latter example, the commas force us to pause before and after "coupled with exercise," offsetting it and emphasizing a point that might have been glossed over otherwise.

• The comma can be used to maximize word economy. Placing a comma in the right spot can enable you to delete several words. For example:

I liked chocolate and she liked vanilla.

I liked chocolate, she vanilla.

All in all, the comma has so many different creative uses and can enhance a work creatively in so many ways, that it can be detrimental
not
to use it. Like its cousin the period, it is one of the few marks of punctuation that must be used throughout.

Let's look at the comma in the hands of a master. Joseph Conrad, in
Heart of Darkness,
uses commas to create a memorable setting:

A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innu-merable windows with Venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right

and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar.

It's amazing what he achieves in one sentence, all with the use of commas. He has created an entire setting. Each comma not only helps increase the list, but also separates, gives us time to ponder each aspect of the setting. By inserting all of this information under the umbrella of a single sentence, divided only by commas, Conrad asks us to experience this entire setting as one thought, asks us to realize the whole picture of this desolate place in one unremitting image.

Here's another example, this from the opening sentence of J. M. Coetzee's novel
Disgrace:

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

This example comes at the suggestion of critically acclaimed novelist and writing teacher Paul Cody, and is an example that he teaches repeatedly. He offers this analysis: "This is a seemingly simple sentence, broken into six parts, using only commas. The language is spare, but the use of the commas give the sentence great power and irony. The reader has to pause five times, and the sense of the man is that he's a control freak, he's got everything in order, he's figured it all out. But each part of the sentence undermines what he's saying. We know he's got it all wrong, that he's figured out nothing, that he has no understanding whatsoever of sex, love, the human heart. And each comma makes us pause, is a nail in the coffin of his soul, his isolation."

James Baldwin uses the comma heavily in his story "Sonny's Blues":

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling

out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

The abundant commas here reflect the narrator's experience as he's reading the piece, reflect his being shocked by the news, and needing multiple pauses to take it all in. John Cheever uses the comma for a different effect in his story "The Enormous Radio":

Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.

The commas here mimic the feeling of detailing items in a list. Except the grocery list here is their lives, which have been planned out too perfectly, too methodically. The commas subtly hint at this.

In her story "What I Know," Victoria Lancelotta uses commas to complement the content:

This is the sort of air that sticks, the kind you want to pull off you, away from your skin, or wipe away in great sluicing motions and back into the water where it surely belongs, because this is not the sort of air that anyone could breathe. You could die, drown, trying to breathe this.

We almost feel as if we're suffocating, drowning in her commas, which is exactly the type of air she's trying to describe.

In one of the great poems of the twentieth century, "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot opens with a comma-laden sentence:

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot could have chosen to separate each of these images into several sentences, but instead he chose to keep them together, in one long sentence, connected by commas. By doing so, he forces us to take in the image of April in one long thought, and to fully realize how cruel it is.

Perhaps because of this reason, because of its ability to connect several images in one thought, you'll find that the comma is often used in literature when introducing a character. Consider this example from Saul Bellow's "Leaving the Yellow House":

You couldn't help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs.

From Ella Leffland's "The Linden Tree":

Giulio was a great putterer. You could always see him sweeping the front steps or polishing the doorknobs, stopping to gossip with the neighbors. He was a slight, pruny man of sixty-eight, perfectly bald, dressed in heavy trousers, a bright sports shirt with a necktie, and an old man's sweater-jacket, liver-colored and hanging straight to the knees.

The commas here enable you take in all of the character traits at

once, to absorb this person in one image, as you might do if meeting him in person. Notice also the varying of style here: both of these examples begin with short, comma-less sentences, and culminate in long, comma-laden sentences. Not only does this help to create contrast, to break up the rhythm and style, but it further demonstrates that the author's use of commas is deliberate.

"It is a safe statement that a gathering of commas (except on certain lawful occasions, as in a list) is a suspicious circumstance."

— H. W.
and
F. G. Fowler,
The Kinq's English
DANGER OF OVERUSE

The necessity of the comma causes writers to misuse it more than any other punctuation mark. The period is luckier in this respect, since it is appears less frequently and is less open to interpretation; the colon, semicolon, and dash are also lucky, as they can easily absent themselves from most works, and thus hide from heavy misuse. Yet the comma demands to be used—and used frequently— and this, together with the fact that it carries nebulous rules, makes it a prime target. And the main way writers misuse the comma is to overuse it.

If there is anything worse than a work bereft of commas, it is one drowning in them. "Any one who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his conscience, as severely as we ought to do about disagreeable conduct in real life," said the Fowler brothers in
The King's English
in 1905. This might be a bit extreme, but their point is well taken.

Overusing commas can create many problems:

• When a sentence is laden with commas, it slows to a crawl, makes readers feel as if they're plowing through quicksand. For example:

The florist, the one with the red hair, who had the only shop in town, right on my corner, was having a sale, at least a partial sale, of her trees, which were half dead, and overpriced to begin with.

Readers don't want to have to stop several times to finish a single sentence. As a writer your foremost concern is keeping readers turning pages, and thus you must be keenly aware of when you're slowing the pace, and only do so for an excellent reason. This especially holds true if you're in a section of your work, like an action scene, where a fast pace is required.

• A comma pauses, qualifies, or divides a thought, but if done too frequently, the original thought can become lost. For example:

We can eat our ice cream, soft, vanilla ice cream, with extra sprinkles, with those cherries on top, with whipped cream and hot fudge, in the living room.

The main point here was supposed to be that they could eat their ice cream in the living room. But with such a long aside, that point is all but lost. The commas, overused, distract to a fault.

Some would say, in a manner of speaking, that, given the context of the Greek empire, and the context of world affairs, Alexander, in light of his time, was a great warrior.

The comma can be overused when qualifying, as in the above example. When everything is qualified it creates a hesitant, uncon-fident feel to a work, as if the writer's afraid to say what he has to. Academics particularly fall prey to this. If we take out the qualifications (and the commas they demand), the point is more bold, succinct:

Alexander was a great warrior.

Now a stance is taken and whether it's right or wrong, readers will admire it. Readers want strong arguments and strong opinions; they don't like writers who play it safe. There is a benefit to entertaining one thought—particularly a complicated one—without interruption.

• Sometimes commas are simply unnecessary. Some sentences work with a comma, but also work equally well without one. If so, it is always preferable to omit it. For example:

He told me that, if I worked hard, he would give me Saturday off.

He told me that if I worked hard he would give me Saturday off.

Neither of these is "correct." It depends on your intent: if you really feel the need to emphasize the qualification of his working hard, then you need the commas. But if not, they can be removed. In writing, less is more, and you never want to slow the reader unless you have to.

HOW TO UNDERUSE IT

The comma is one of the only punctuation marks so widely used

that its
omission
is a stylistic statement. Writers like Gertrude Stein and Cormac McCarthy are known for eschewing the comma, and books exist that never employed a single comma, notably Peter Carey's
True History of the Kelly Gang,
which won the 2001 Booker Prize. Why would a writer opt to ignore the friendly comma? What would he gain from it?

The reasons to underuse the comma are largely similar to the reasons not to overuse it. Yet there is a subtle difference between aiming not to overuse something and deliberately aiming to
underuse
it. In the former, you aim to avoid, or edit out, a problem; in the latter, you aim to deliberately craft something in a certain way. The benefits achieved will largely parallel each other, yet there are different reasons for doing so, and different approaches: