Comma Sense

As a professional editor, I try to keep my copyediting skills honed and up-to-date with the most current standards. And I will admit that while I feel fairly confident in my abilities, I still find myself reaching for my huge resource bible, The Chicago Manual of Style, on occasion just to make sure I am being absolutely accurate in my editing suggestions to my clients.

But a couple of weeks ago, I was reading a book for a book club that I am in (which was printed by a very large and well-known publishing house), and I found myself questioning everything that I thought I knew. The book contained some of the strangest punctuation I have seen in a professional setting, and the punctuation even seemed wrong to me in some instances. It was distracting to the point that I had a hard time enjoying my reading experience of the book (it was a genuinely good story), and it began to undermine my confidence in my own expertise in regards to the editing project that I was working on at the same time. I am a stickler for appropriate punctuation - as one of my clients puts it, I am “ruthless when it comes to commas.” So I questioned whether I was right in my analysis of the published text I was reading or if I have somehow been in error all these years.

In response to this quandary, I bought myself a new grammar book focused specifically on punctuation to verify all the things I thought I knew. The author of the book reminded me about the subjective nature of much of grammar - it is, in a way, a matter of personal style and preference because whatever method you decide on could be part of your individual “style.” The original purpose of punctuation was to provide readers a way of knowing when to pause or breathe so that the flow of the wording and ideas made sense. So really, as an author, you can put the comma (probably the most pesky and misunderstood reference mark in writing) wherever it feels “right” to you. I even have one client who told me that she looks at the comma suggestions I make and then chooses sometimes to ignore them if she doesn’t like how it sounds to her in her head when she reads it. And truly, I have no problem with that. I am just making revisions based on best practices out of the Chicago Style manual as I understand them.

But this experience was a good wakeup call to me that the work that I do, as well as the work of the authors that I service, is more of an art than a science, and there is room for interpretation in this industry. That being said, I am still very grateful that there is some kind of rule of thumb to use in writing so that there is some semblance of order for us all to follow. It is all a matter of comma sense ;)

(Reference book for punctuation that I recently bought: Actually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps.)