When commas and pandas go rogue

Book cover image courtesy of Amazon

The classic joke is shown on the cover of a book by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Gotham 2004). The subject is punctuation, and the joke goes something like this: A panda bear walks into a coffee shop and orders a sandwich and a coffee. He eats his meal, then pulls out a gun and shoots into the ceiling. "Why did you shoot those holes in my ceiling?" asks the mystified owner.

The panda bear takes a wildlife manual out of his back pocket and hands it to the restauranteur. "It's who I am," he says. "Look me up." Then he turns on his heel and leaves the cafe.

The owner closes up and calls a plasterer. While he's waiting for the repairman to come and fix the ceiling, he opens the wildlife book and finds the definition of panda, "a large black and white bear native to China. Diet consists mostly of eucalyptus. Eats, shoots and leaves."

He looks on the publication data page of the manual and then pulls out his cell phone and calls in his complaint to the publisher. "There's one comma too many in the panda entry in your wildlife manual," he says, "and a panda bear came in here and took advantage. I'll be sending you the bill for my new ceiling."

Commas: where to use them

Commas are not like salt. They can't be sprinkled over prose to give it flavour. For the most part, their presence is an indication of a pause in speech. For instance, they appear before or after adverb phrases, like this. Christopher Altman, of Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York, explains this in more detail here. (By the way, did you notice how the commas were used in the previous sentence to set off the city and state?

As well as being used to set off adverbial sentence modifiers, commas are used to separate items in a list. To illustrate, a comma has been used after the opening phrase of this sentence, as well as after each item in the following list of parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

By the way, that last comma, the one before the phrase "and adverbs," is called the Oxford or serial comma. It's the one that comes just before the word and at the end of a list. As seen in the previous sentence, and the following one too, commas also set off appositive constructions. June, my teacher, loves commas.

Finally, commas are used to separate subordinate clauses from main clauses. This is illustrated by the following sentence. When Tom got home, Mary had already made dinner. The same punctuation pattern can be applied with "Whereas" or "As soon as" at the beginning of the sentence.

While we're on the subject of clauses, I should raise the thorny problem of restrictive versus non-restrictive clauses. As the name suggests, a restrictive clause (beginning with who or which) which restricts the meaning of a noun, and is therefore essential to identifying the subject, is not set off from the rest of the sentence by commas. Here is an example. The man who held the door open for you was the robber. (Without the who clause we don't know which man.)

On the other hand, a non-restrictive clause adds information that is additional, rather than essential to identifying the subject. Tom, who bought a used bicycle, asked me to go cycling with him. (This clause is non-restrictive, and therefore set off by commas. We do not need the information in the clause in order to identify Tom, who has already named in the sentence.)

Another role that commas play is to separate the main part of a sentence from quotations that are part of the same sentence, as follows. "John," she said, "Please come here." Here's another example: "Please come here, Sally," said John.

This brings us to one more use of commas. They are used to set off the name of the person being addressed directly in imperative sentences. "Bill, stop that." By the way, did you notice the second comma in the previous sentence? It sets off a phrase in the middle of the sentence, which in this case, happens to be a question.

One more use of commas is that they follow certain sentence connectors. For instance, we may use the word "however" to connect two main clauses, as in the following example. Tom hurried along the street when he saw the bus; however, it left before he got there. In the previous sentence, a semi-colon (more about those in a later post) is used before the sentence connector, and a comma after it. This punctuation pattern also applies to other sentence connectors, including "nevertheless" and "still."

If I had wanted to, I could have put an Oxford comma after "nevertheless" in the previous sentence. But since that is an optional comma, I chose not to.

Commas: where NOT to use them

One place where commas are NOT found (or at least they shouldn't be found) is between a subject and its predicate, that is, between a noun and a verb. What I mean is that commas should not come between a subject and its verb unless there are two of them, and they are there to set off "sentence interrupters." (See below.)

Apparently I am not the only English instructor to find that students want to put commas here. Christopher Altman, an Assistant professor at a college in New York, has written an article mentioning that this mistake is quite common, and explaining that this is wrong.

[By the way, did you notice the notice the commas in the "sentence interrupters," as Altman calls them, and the appositive construction above?]

Another error is the comma splice. A fairly common problem among novice writers, this is the mistake of attempting to join two independent clauses together with nothing more than a comma. When only a comma is placed between two clauses, the result is a run-on sentence.

Altman points out another error which writers make quite frequently. This is the mistake of putting a comma after "which," when actually the comma should come before "which." The following sentence illustrates.

The student forgot to put a comma before the non-restrictive clause, which was a mistake.

Lewis Thomas on colons and semi-colons

I like what the wonderful essayist Lewis Thomas has to say about these punctuation marks, and how he distinguishes them.

The semi-colon, which Thomas has "grown fond of," he describes as a reminder that something needs to be added to the sentence. With a semi-colon, he says, "you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come..."

Colons he finds "far less attractive," since they give the reader a feeling of "being ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself..."

A further objection to colons is that they point to "sentences that will be labelling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven't enough sense to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered."*

In a more prosaic world than that of the fanciful land of Lewis Thomas, the function of a colon is to indicate a list to come, whether this consists of words or phrases, like this: Tom, Dick and Harry, or like this: Tom's dog, Dick's cat, and Harry's monkey.

On the other hand, semi-colons, unlike mere commas, are permissible when you want to "glue" two independent clauses together. Of course, these clauses should be closely related; otherwise, you would be using a period at the end of the first one and starting a new sentence with the second.

*The quotations come from Thomas's essay "Notes on Punctuation," originally published in 1974 in a lovely collection called The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (Bantam: New York).

Try a free quiz by Jane Straus on Colons and Semi-colons here. 

Exclamation marks

Warning! Do not overuse these punctuation marks!

The exclamation mark is used to indicate an excited, angry or other strongly emotional tone.

Advertisers love them!!!

You may also be tempted to use them in formal writing. Let me give you a word of warning. Don't!

Or perhaps you are submitting something for publication. In an attempt to demonstrate your knowledge of how all the different punctuation marks are used, you may feel tempted to slip in an exclamation point or two.

Beware!!! That would be a mistake!

So who uses exclamation marks? Texting teens, like, duh!!!

And politicians, of course!

These punctuation shouts are used by anyone who wants to punch up the emotional tone of a piece without bothering to work with more complex rhetorical tools like word choice and sentence structure. This is done in the vain hope of getting the reader to pay more attention.

I'll let you in a secret. It doesn't work!!!

Want more information? Try the English Club.

Enough said.

Quotation Marks

There are two types of quotation marks, single, as in 'quotation,' and double, like this: "Quotation."

What's the difference?

Double quotation marks are more commonly used. Here are their purposes:

1. To enclose a quotation in a piece of text, as in the following: "My goodness," said Lucy. "I've lost my quotation marks."

2. To identify the titles of articles in newspapers, magazines, or books. They are also used to show the titles of poems, songs and short stories, or segments within books. For instance, one might mention that the short "Benny" is by Mordecai Richler.

3. To set off words that the writer is using ironically, as in the following sentence. The "elegant" dress turned out to be badly cut, sloppily sewn, and made of a cheap and coarse material.

4. To set off or differentiate words that are being referred to as words, as in the following sentence. Although the word "patience" sounds like "patients," the two are spelled differently and have different meanings; also, the former noun is non-countable and singular, while the latter is countable and plural.

Single quotation marks are used to enclose a second quotation within the first one, as in this sentence. Lucy shivered as she said, "Although the house was empty, I heard a weird voice say 'Hark!' just as I was going downstairs."

Want more details? Check out Writer's Block.

Apostrophes indicate possessives and contractions

Picture: Printable alphabets

I. Apostrophes are used to INDICATE POSSESSION. They follow singular nouns, common or proper, coming before the s to form a singular possessive, as follows:


     The child's mother appeared at the door. (common noun)

     London's fame is indisputable. (proper nouns)

When the noun, whether proper or common, already ends in s, we have options. We may use 's or simply s', as shown below.

     Marcus's election was a surprise to many of us.

[The s's may be replaced with the 'of' possessive: The election of Marcus as president was a surprise.]

It is acceptable to write the possessive of a proper noun with or without the second s, as seen below:

    Morris's car broke down. [or Morris' car broke down.]


Technically, it is also correct to use an apostrophe alone after the plural s of a common noun to indicate that it is plural and possessive. However in general, these combination plural possessives are stylistically a bit awkward, and better avoided. (Use the of possessive instead.)

     We put away all the boys' belongings. (This refers to items belonging to more than one boy)
     We put away the belongings of all the boys. (alternative of possessive sounds better here)

[Note that the following sentences sound fine, because people and children are irregular plurals.]

     We put away the children's belongings.
     Marcus was the people's choice.

In the case of compound nouns, the 's comes at the end, like this:
     The five-year-old's shoes...
     The do-it-yourselfer's project...

Note that possessive pronouns (hers, theirs, its etc.) do NOT employ apostrophes.(exception: one's)

II. Apostrophes are also used TO JOIN CONTRACTIONS. Their presence indicates that letters have been omitted, as shown below:

    It's a long way to New York. (It is a long way...)
    He's been having health problems. (He has...)
    She's going home now. (She is...)
    We've nearly finished our meal. (We have...)

Apostrophes are NOT used to name decades with numbers, but they are used to talk about individual letters of the alphabet, as in dotting one's i's and crossing one's t's. (One is the only pronoun to be used with an apostrophe to show plural.)

For more information, read Jane Straus's list of rules and try her quiz, here.

Commas set off non-restrictive clauses

Photo from Grammar.about.com

Many writers feel doubt about the need for commas around relative clauses.The way to overcome this doubt is to understand the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. A restrictive (or defining)  clause is essential to identify the noun it modifies.

For instance, in the sentence "The boy who stole the bicycle was caught and punished," the restrictive clause (shown in boldface type) is necessary to the sense of the subject, and the sentence. In other words, the boy who stole the bicycle is not just any boy.

On the other hand, if we look at the slightly altered sentence "Tommy, who stole the bicycle, was caught and punished," we can see at once that the name Tommy identifies the specific boy. In this sentence, the phrase "who stole the bicycle" is not necessary to define or identify who is the subject of the sentence.

Commas represent pauses in speech, and when we speak this sentence aloud, we pause before and after this non-restrictive modifier, and when we write the sentence down, we mark these pauses with commas. The pauses, and the commas that represent them, clarify the meaning of the sentence.

The non-restrictive adjective clause is not the only type of modifier that requires commas before and after. Adverb clauses and other modifiers, sometimes called sentence interrupters, may also preceded and followed by commas, as the following sentences show.

     The sky, they say, is the limit.
     The moon, we were told, is made of green cheese.
     The sentence, we noticed, contained an improperly punctuated restrictive clause.
     The theatre, unfortunately, was not the only building that had to close due to the fire. 
 
These interrupter commas travel in pairs, one before and one after the modifier, unless, of course, the restrictive clause reaches the end of the sentence. In that case, it is preceded by a comma and followed by a period. Here is an example:

     I finally got a chance to see the old movie, which I had never seen before.

A word to the wise: To master comma usage, the writer must understand sentence structure thoroughly, including the relationship between the comma on paper and the pause in speech.

Ready for a quiz? Try one by Jane Straus here. Need more comma rules? Check where to use commas here and where NOT to use commas here.