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The Life-Saving Comma
It's harder than it looks to communicate with other people. How does one move a thought from one's own brain to another's brain? Since the human species unfortunately has been denied telepathic abilities, we have been forced to develop other means of communication. The two main ways are speech and writing.
Speech is good for communicating with people in the same room, since it can be reinforced by gestures, body language, and other non-verbal cues. As well, a speaker can monitor his listeners' comprehension and agreement, adding more complete explanations and argumentation as needed. However, speech becomes less effective as the audience becomes more distant and, in many cases, it is simply not possible as a means of communication.
Enter written communication. This method can be used to communicate with far-away audiences, but it lacks the ability to augment the written words and respond to audience feedback in real time. As a result, it is very important for authors to carefully craft their writing to make sure it conveys their intended meaning to the readers. One of the tools that writers have developed to assist in this task is the humble comma. By indicating where the author would have paused had he been speaking, it partially overcomes one of the drawbacks of written communication.
It is common for modern educators to downplay the importance of commas, along with the other punctuation tools, but they do so at their peril. Or, more accurately, at the peril of their students.
Lynne Truss has three charming and very amusing books for children on the comma, the apostrophe, and other punctuation marks, repectively.
“Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!” has humorous illustrations of how the meaning is changed by the use or omission of a comma, while “The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why You Can’t Manage Without Apostrophes! ” does the same for the apostrophe. “Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!” looks at other marks, such as the hyphen and semicolon.
Her book for adults, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” got a fair bit of media coverage at the time. It is also an amusing but informative call to curmudgeonly arms.
Here’s the Amazon link for the children’s “Eats Shoots and Leaves”:
http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Commas-Difference/dp/0399244913/ref=pd_sim_b_1
If you scroll down you’ll see links for the other two that you can click on for more information.