I realize that on the grand scale of interesting things, punctuation is pretty far down the list. (In a recent survey, it was in a dead heat with stovepipes, just behind pocket lint.)<\/p>\n
Punctuation is a dying art. I\u2019m not sure whether this is the writers\u2019 or the readers\u2019 fault, but I mostly blame the writers. It\u2019s as if chefs got careless about seasoning.<\/p>\n
Periods can present problems, but they\u2019re fairly low-maintenance, because most people know when to stop. Not so with semicolons. Many abuse them; few can even explain how they differ from colons. Apostrophes are increasingly misused or ignored. I\u2019m no fan of McDonald\u2019s, but at least the company wears its apostrophe proudly (unlike apostates such as Walgreens).<\/p>\n
Hyphens have become a mind-numbing mystery, rarely used where they\u2019re needed\u2014and often wrongly placed where a long dash should be. Parentheses confuse a lot of people (do periods go inside or outside?). Question marks seem easy, but let me ask if you think the one at the end of this sentence is correct? Because it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
But today I want to home in on the comma. Lately I\u2019ve noticed a tendency in newspapers and magazines to reflexively inject a comma when a noun is described by two adjectives\u2014something we do in English all the time. Trouble is, you don\u2019t always want a comma in a two-adjectives-plus-noun construction. For example: a shiny, antique Rolls<\/em>. I just can\u2019t buy that comma. Here\u2019s one I do buy: an honest, hard-working man<\/em>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a subtle distinction: Are both adjectives equally focused on the noun (he\u2019s an honest man and a hard-working man), or does the first adjective describe a cohesive adjective-noun unit (antique Rolls<\/em>). I reject a comma because shiny<\/em> applies to antique Rolls<\/em> as if that phrase were a single word. How silly would it be to write a shiny, thing<\/em>?<\/p>\n To get technical, we\u2019re talking here about coordinate adjectives<\/strong>. A useful guideline: the comma is likely if it\u2019s a comfortable substitute for and<\/em>. You\u2019d call a man \u201chonest and hard-working,\u201d but it sounds clunky to call a car \u201cshiny and antique.\u201d<\/p>\n Here are some recent ill-advised print-media commas: \u201cModest, working-class suburb\u201d (the working-class suburb is modest; the comma is superfluous). \u201cA slim, 30-year-old bartender\u201d (no comma: \u201cslim\u201d further describes the 30-year-old mixologist). \u201cThe original, 1879 site\u201d (that comma is too bizarre for comment).<\/p>\n Admittedly, there\u2019s a lot of gray area here. The writer\u2019s intent must be analyzed, and in some cases interpretations will vary. Here\u2019s a two-in-one-sentence example: \u201cfrom a confused drug-riddled adolescence to a final, eye-catching impression of her.\u201d I\u2019d put a comma after \u201cconfused\u201d and no comma after \u201cfinal.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad when journalists promote traditional punctuation, but comma overcompensation is as inadvisable as any other kind.<\/p>\n \u2014 Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I realize that on the grand scale of interesting things, punctuation is pretty far down the list. (In a recent survey, it was in a dead heat with stovepipes, just behind pocket lint.) Punctuation is a dying art. I\u2019m not sure whether this is the writers\u2019 or the readers\u2019 fault, but I mostly blame the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16,15,13,38,35,29,46,47,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adjectives-adverbs","category-apostrophes","category-colons","category-commas","category-dashes","category-hyphens","category-parentheses","category-periods","category-question-marks","category-semicolons"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}