💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~spencerwi › punctuation.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:57:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I had an interesting conversation with my wife over lunch, when she asked me to act as “editor” for some written materials she’s putting together for a women’s Bible study (that is, be “a second set of eyes” to proofread). In particular, she said she has a hard time knowing when to use a comma vs when not to (either by just not having any punctuation in that spot, or by starting a new sentence).
She was taught with the “put a comma where you’d take a breath” rule of thumb, which isn’t quite accurate, and I think I landed on why commas (and semicolons, by extension) are so confusing for a lot of folks: namely, people are often taught to think of punctuation as “stage directions” for speaking, when punctuation isn’t that at all. Punctuation is a markup language for organizing written-down thought, and while that organization does influence how people speak when reading the written-down thought, the “speaking out loud” part doesn’t (generally) influence how punctuation is to be used.
Viewed through that lens, it becomes a bit more clear how to use commas: since a sentence is a “unit of thought” (specifically, a sentence is generally one thought, and one thought is usually one sentence), commas are then used to separate individual sections or items within a single thought, which is why you put commas after each item in a list. So then the rule of thumb becomes something more like “if you need to clearly demarcate between two distinct items that are part of the same thought, that’s when you’d use a comma”.
A bunch of other comma usage shakes out of that (examples of each in parentheses):
Anyhow, I guess what I’m saying is that I spent my lunch hour talking about grammar and punctuation with my wife, so clearly we’re both really fascinating people who live thrilling lives.