In Defense of The Little Guy

So you might be wondering….have I taken up a new cause? Maybe I've decided to champion petite people everywhere? (Hey, I am one!) Or then again, "the little guy" is often used to refer to plain, ordinary people. You know, the ones who tend to get stepped on by the big shots of the world. We could certainly use defending against them, right?

But no, in this case I am bravely standing tall and taking a firm stance in defense of…

One of the tiniest entities in all of literature: the comma.

Yes, that's right. The maligned, ignored, misused comma. It's a simple bit of punctuation that, when placed just right, properly separates phrases and imbues our language with much of its nuances. And yet, for decades now writers have been warned off the comma with such claims as "they slow the reader down!" Really? When was the last time a comma hooked itself to your eyes and refused to let them move across the page?  

But the real problem seems to be that a lot of writers have forgotten the proper use of the comma – or maybe they never learned. Besides being a writer, I'm also an editor, and in addition to that right now I"m judging contest entries. And I'm constantly seeing things like, Or or  or  In that last one, Smiling Mary would be her name, right? I could go on and on, but the point is that the placement of a comma affects the meaning of the sentence. It's not random, and it's not up to the whim of the writer.

Do I sound like I'm pet-peeving? Darn right I am. Or should that be: darn right, I am? But I spend more time moving commas around from wrong places to where they're actually needed than I do focusing on story content. There are a lot of great writers on the horizon when it comes to theme, emotion, character interaction, etc., but if I had to make an estimate, I'd say a good 90% of new writers have little or no clue about punctuation.

C'mon, people, get a clue! (not: C'mon people get a clue).

Oh, and P.S., the comma, semi-colon, and colon are not interchangeable! 

 

Tagged: Comma, commas, punctuation