Comma police

11 Comments

Okay, this is becoming a trend, and it's got to stop.

Everywhere I've looked in the past week or so, mostly in nonfiction published by various respected and established publications, I've come across sentences punctuated like this:

* According to congressperson, James Gorgonzola, dogs are mammals.

Or:

* I asked prolific author, Jane Zloty, for her opinion.

Or:

* Tennis superstar, Pat Ziffzaff, has now won five thousand straight games.

(The asterisks here, loosely borrowed from a similar use in linguistics, indicate that I consider these constructions to be incorrect.)

Such constructions should be governed by the rule regarding restrictive appositives. The general idea is that if there are a bunch of members of the group that you're referring to, and you want to single out one of them by name, you're restricting the class; a restrictive phrase of this sort should not be set off by commas. (If you have access to the 14th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and want more info, see section 5.49 to 5.50.)

The confusion probably stems from two sources:

  • If there's only one member of the class you're talking about, then the name is nonrestrictive; the name is just another way to refer to what you've already described. In that case, you do set the name off with commas. "According to the senior Senator from Mississippi, James Gorgonzola, dogs are mammals." "I asked the world's most prolific author, Jane Zloty, for her opinion." "The record-holder for longest tennis winning streak, Pat Ziffzaff, has now won five thousand straight games."
  • If you give the name first, and then a descriptive phrase, the phrase is almost always phrased in such a way that you use commas. "According to James Gorgonzola, a congressperson, dogs are mammals." "I asked Jane Zloty, a prolific author, for her opinion." "Pat Ziffzaff, tennis superstar, has now won five thousand straight games." (See Chicago section 5.66.)

But regardless of where it comes from, the punctuation used in the first examples up above is (to quote Zed) wrong Wrong WRONG!

Comma police officer Jed Hartman strongly recommends that writers stop using commas that way.

(By the way, Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror. When you point out the errors I've made here, please don't be too smug about it.)

11 Responses to “Comma police”

  1. heather w

    CPO Hartman, I commend your efforts in this area. I would merely suggest that your lesson would be improved by inclusion of examples indicating proper comma (non)usage. Simply removing all commas is not the correct answer; I would argue that the corrected first example would retain its second comma, separating the cheese from the dog (not an easy task).

    Is this in your top ten list of Heinous Punctuation Crimes? My number one would have to be the plurapostrophe, e.g. “Good Eat’s” ::shudder::

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  2. naomi_traveller

    I wholeheartedly agree. But perhaps more importantly, they are incorrect because Occam’s razor applies to punctuation…

    All three examples you cite as incorrect would scan correctly and unambiguously with no commas at all. If you read them aloud, you would not have to pause to make the meaning clear.

    The same cannot be said of “I asked the world’s most prolific author, Jane Zloty, for her opinion.” or “I asked Jane Zloty, a prolific author, for her opinion.” In these instances, the commas are essential to making the sentence’s meaning clear. The inserted clarification interrupts the flow of the sentence, so when reading these examples aloud, you *have* to pause where the commas are.

    Poo on sloppy grammer. Poo on it I say.

    -naomi, saluting your editorship

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  3. naomi_traveller

    oo yes. also what heather said about the cheese.

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  4. Jenn Reese

    Thank you, Jed. I asked a question about this very topic in my journal a while back, since one of my co-workers at Slangman wanted to put the commas into my sentences regardless of the restrictiveness of the appositive. A brawl ensued. So, you’re a little late on this one, but I appreciate the rant nonetheless.
    ~Aspiring writer Jenn Reese

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  5. Jed

    Ooh, good point about the cheese and the dog, Heather. I got so carried away by my own rhetoric that I neglected to look carefully at the corrected versions of those sentences. (I even considered including corrected versions at the end of this entry, but assumed (without stopping to think about it) that full commaectomies were in order and that corrected versions were therefore unnecessary. I shoulda thought about it more.)

    Although you’re right about the pauses, Naomi, I would caution that basing comma use entirely on whether there is or isn’t a pause in the sentence can sometimes lead to rather nonstandard comma use. Sometimes it results in commas stuck into the middle of a sentence even though they have no grammatical purpose there; sometimes it results in leaving out commas that are essential to comprehension even though they don’t indicate a spoken pause.

    The real problem here is that English doesn’t have enough punctuation marks. We should have a pause mark that’s separate from the structural-offset mark. Separate content and presentation!

    Jenn: oog, I totally forgot about that entry of yours. I actually wrote a brief version of this comma discussion to post in response to that entry, but I got tangled up and didn’t have time to look things up in Chicago to support what I was saying (and to remind myself which kind is called “restrictive” and which kind is called “nonrestrictive”; I always mix those terms up), so I decided to hold off and write it up in more detail and post it in my own journal. Then I got busy and sidetracked and never got around to it. Sorry for the delay….

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  6. Jed

    Oh, and as for Heinous Punctuation Crimes, there are some (such as Heather’s plurapostrophe, and the related “emphaquotes” used to “emphasize” phrases on “signs”) that are so widespread and so heinous that I despair of their ever being addressed. I figure the comma usage I’m objecting to is in limited enough use, and is confusing to enough educated and well-meaning writers, that there’s a chance that education can still address the problem.

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  7. Mike Jasper

    One way I taught 7th and 8th graders this comma rule (yes, I did do mini-lessons on grammar and punctuation, thanks!) was that you needed commas in a sentence like this if the “stuff” inside the commas could be TAKEN OUT of the sentence, and the sentence would still make sense. The commas are there to show the readers that this is extra stuff.

    Did I just use an emphaquote up there for “stuff”?

    (And where DOES the ? go when the sentence ends in non-dialog quotes, like the sentence above?)

    This grammar and punctuation never ends!!!

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  8. Nick Mamatas

    Are you seeing this in newspapers or somewhere else? If it’s in the papers, I’m pretty surprised. Papers squeeze out every last comma (even abandoning the serial comma) in order to conserve column inches.

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  9. Jay Lake

    Eror?

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  10. irilyth

    Indeed, I was pretty sure that “any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror” had to be a deliberate joke. :^) Right, Jed?

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  11. Jed

    Mike: Yup, good way of putting it. (Though I’m not sure I trust everyone to recognize that the sentence no longer makes sense without the name in these sorts of cases; if what they’re looking at is the sentence with the name in it, I’d expect some people would have a hard time seeing that removing the name makes the phrasing ungrammatical. But I’ve never actually tried this, so I could well be wrong.) Question marks: if they aren’t part of the material that’s inside quotation marks, they always go outside the quotation marks. Only commas and periods move inside, and only in American punctuation; doesn’t matter whether the quotation marks are for dialog or not.

    Nick: I don’t usually read print newspapers, but I’ve definitely seen this in online editions of high-profile newspapers lately. Possibly including the NYT, I forget.

    Jay and irilyth: Yup, “eror” was a joke. I’m sure there are others that were unintentional, though.

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