Punctuation, Part 1

I have chosen 3 chapters out of the Punctuation section of the book that I will examine and analyze in this post. The topics I chose are the comma, the unnecessary comma, and the semicolon. I chose these based on difficulties and/or confusions I have had on these topics in my past writing.

Whytock, Ken "T-shirt Slogan: Punctuation saved grandma's life."
03/02/14 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

The comma

Ah the comma. What a mixed relationship I have with the comma. First of all, I have always gotten mixed signals when it comes to adding a comma after the 2nd to last item in a list, before the "and blah blah". However this book claims that it is definitely recommended, so that was kind of nice to have that cleared up a bit after all these years. And to find out that I wasn't doing it wrong for a decade. I also learned a little about how the comma can change the meaning of a sentence, if only slightly. I didn't know that when a date is inverted you don't need a comma, so that was new. However I personally love commas, and like to use them to prevent confusion like the book advises. However as we will see in my next analyzed Punctuation chapter, I maybe love them a little too much sometimes. 

Unnecessary commas

Yep I definitely can be over-prone to commas. But I never really knew the exact rules. I think the most surprising to me was that you aren't supposed to use a comma after the last item in a series. In my head I sometimes naturally pause there in the sentence and this makes me add an unnecessary comma. Also there isn't supposed to be a comm between compound elements that aren't independent clauses, which is something I also know I do, but can't really recognize the exact instances of. Looking throughout this chapter I notice a LOT that I have to improve on. Just in a 2nd or 3rd reading of my draft I can eliminate about 20 commas. However I definitely have to show this chapter to my friend because I've been telling her some of these rules for years and she's been denying them. So HA, I win. Just kidding. 

The semicolon

Before this year, I really didn't know much about when to use a semicolon at all. But with that whole "semicolon movement" I have at least a basic idea of when to use them, although the movement's definition is very different from the book's. I was able to get a much better grasp on the semicolon after reading this. From what I can gather, the semicolon is used mostly before an example or "in fact" is listed. I don't think I use the semicolon often enough at all, and I will for sure be going back through my draft to check for more opportunities to use these handy little guys.


Reflection

While reading Carrie Belle and Grace's drafts, I noticed that they were on two different spectrums. Like me, Grace tended to use some unnecessary commas, and I feel like being able to recognize it in her writing helped me to learn how to recognize it in my own. For example in her sentence "He says that the general population makes vaccination decisions based on emotions and how devastated they would feel if their child got Polio, rather than statistics, and the fact that the last Polio case seen in the US was in 1979 and the Polio death rate was decreasing on its own before the vaccine was introduced (Perkins, 2013)" has an unnecessary comma after "statistics", which I learned in chapter 33a of the reading. 

Conversely, Carrie Belle's draft could benefit from a few more commas. But I am hesitant to tell her to add too many commas because I might tell her to add too many... However in her sentence "After the groundwork of basic understanding on the subject has been laid down for the reader Parry employs appeals to emotion in order to truly capture the reader’s more in depth understanding of genetic engineering" I felt confident in recommending that she add a comma after "reader" after my reading in 32j about adding commas to avoid confusion.