The comma is sadly misunderstood. Yes, it has all sorts of technical uses, with technical names (most of which I don’t remember), but there is a commonsense way to take care of most cases: think of a comma as a place where you pause for a moment when you are reading aloud.
True, this won’t get you through everything, but it sure helps.
Try reading a passage out loud, pausing exaggeratedly every time you reach a comma. You will probably notice that some of them seem to work and some don’t. If the passage is from your own writing, my frank advice is that you remove the ones that don’t work.
Here’s one of the technical ones: it’s called “the serial comma,” and I’m told that there has been some disagreement about it in the English Usage newsgroup. I am going to present what I think is a compelling reason to use the serial comma; if you leave it out, your series may not mean what you want it to. Here:
Here’s another item that depends on the same issue:
This panda walks into an old west saloon, sits down at the bar, and growls “GIMME EAT.” The barkeep shrugs, goes back into the kitchen, and emerges with a club sandwich.
After wolfing down the sandwich and an unconscionable number of pickles the panda gets up, draws a Buntline Special, puts 3 bullets through the mirror behind the bar, turns, blows the pickle-crock off the table (splattering stinky pickle-juice all over the place), and calmly heads for the door.
The bartender, from his hidey-hole under the bar, hollers, “Dammit, Bear! Ya destroy muh bar, ya stink up the place, and ya haven’t even paid for your lunch!” ...To which the panda replies “Idiot! I’m a *panda*! LOOK IT UP!” ...and away he goes, right out the swinging doors into the street, whistling to himself.
The bartender looks up “panda” in the dictionary and finds: “Large bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats shoots and leaves.”
I have yet to see a single example of a sentence in which the meaning is perverted by the inclusion of a serial comma, so if you think you’ve got one, it’s time to put your cards on the table. Email me: I’m jon (at) bazilians (dot) org. If anyone can send me such a sentence, I’ll put it into this rant as a companion-piece to the one about Ayn Rand & God, above.
Tom Campbell (tomc@NOSPAMmindspring.com) tells me that he is not so sure about the “put it where you’d pause” method. He says that he has seen errors, and offers the following sentence as an example:
I would not put a comma after “boogie”, myself, and I’d advise reading this sentence out loud twice: once with an exaggerated pause after “boogie” and once with no particular pause. Sounds a whole lot better to me without. In fact, try just “...how to boogie is to see him....” -- it flows quite well.
This does, however, point up
the fact that different things sound different to different
folks, and I have to thank Tom for his example. I also have to
apologize to him for my slowness in adding it to this page.
You don’t want to know when he sent it to me.
The word “which” usually belongs in dependent clauses (I think that’s the correct term... as I said, I don’t remember most of the names of these things), and that means you typically find it shortly after a comma. To put that another way, the word “which” is not the same as the word “that”. You wouldn’t say, “This is the house which Jack built.” Don’t use “which” except where it belongs.
So, okay, how do you find out about these things?
For general rules, I happen to like a book called The Elements of Style, by William F. Strunk Jr and E. B. White. For good illustrative examples, consult the works of Karen Elizabeth Gordon (The Transitive Vampire and The Well-Tempered Sentence.) Forgive me if that latter title does not actually have a hyphen in it: I don’t have a copy here to check.