The (Carnivorous) Commas Page: ,
To begin, a comma is a kind of pause, a way to write a breath, an invitation to the reader to suck up some mental oxygen.
Other punctuation marks do these things also, but here I want to focus on the comma.
Whenever your sentence begins with an opening clause, you should use a comma.
Because, if you are over two years old, you have daily spoken a language, you, the users of this program, probably know most of the uses of a comma, even if you never write.
Sometimes you might want to have an effect of everything running together thoughts flowing in a single whishhhh rather than in staccato little pieces of information the mind working in nonlinear fashion looping back on itself more like the strands in a brillo pad than in a straight line you can do this on May 10 2002 or you can live in the potting shed that sits at 2345 South Major Street Little Puddle North Dakota and then you can slip into another mind frame just by your words and all your thought move as one one gray damp lonely morning.
Where would you put the commas? Or would you? What difference would commas make?
Get the idea?
Commas give you some control over the effect your writing will have.
Note: in spite of some really fine works of fiction by William Faulkner, James Joyce and others where commas and other punctuation were purposely left out, one effect of your leaving commas out may be to get English Teachers, other teachers too, to freak with fury.
Remember your audience!
Also remember that trying to connect two sentences together with a comma is called a "comma splice."
Commas are considered too whimpy to tie together two, big, mean ol' sentences.
It's a form of the dreaded run-on sentence , teachers consider this worthy of capital punishment.
Use the box below to write some stream of consciousness. Just pour out your thoughts without using commas or any other form of punctuation.
To return to Step Two, click Step Two.
