Mal ,'Shindig'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
I just read this on another list, and I wanted to share this with people who would be properly appalled.
As a writing teacher as well as PR writer, I recommend using commas only where they help clarify something. If your meaning is clear without one, don't use it.
If it's grammatically incorrect, however, that will immediately lower my opinion of you and the thing you're promoting.
What's appall-worthy in that, Ginger?
(Yes, I kind of suck at grammar. Don't tell.)
Huh. Someone's being carried out in a stretcher. No one i know, but half the floor is staring and pointing.
I recommend using commas only where they help clarify something.
Well, as a general rule, that can help -- there's a huge segment of the "writing" public (I use quotes judiciously) who hemorrhage commas. I think it's a gene, because in Britain that same tendency is expressed in unnecessary and wrong apostrophes.
But, yeah. Gross simplification. I also put in a comma where I would stop for a breath, were I speaking aloud.
If your meaning is clear without one, don't use it.
The use of a comma in this sentence being ironic, in that case?
Someone's being carried out in a stretcher
Before I read the rest of the post, I thought ita was referring to the upcoming comma kerfufle.
You don't place commas according to clarity. You place commas according to grammatical rules. Frequently the result is the same, but my experience has been that if you just let people place commas on the basis of "more clear" or "sounds better," you have commas strewn willy-nilly about a document.
t Obsessive, much?
I thought ita was referring to the upcoming comma kerfufle
This strikes me more as a silent abduction sort of a thing.
But if you don't know the rules, surely clarity is a better guideline than, say, making a pattern on the page.
My great-grandfather and his brothers came to the US on different ships, a few years apart from each other, and each one ended up with a last name spelled slightly differently. (First letter was a yud in Yiddish and sometimes became a Y in English, but sometimes a J, and a vowel that was an ayin in Yiddish sometimes went to E and sometimes I.)
One of the other branches of my family came into NYC in 1890 or 1891, which was when immigrants were being brought through a sort of temporary office while everything on Ellis Island was being built. The records from there are nearly impossible to track down. Before 1889 and after 1892 are much easier.