A Word, Please: Not a cannibal or polygamist? Make sure you use that comma

By June Casagrande

Aug. 21, 2020 12:46 PM PT

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare.

It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, as when someone writes about a specific “word,” but writes it “word”, which is wrong according to American punctuation rules.

Another mistake I see a lot is unneeded commas between adjectives. A gaudy Hawaiian shirt should have no comma because you only put commas between adjectives when the word “and” would make sense there. It’s not a gaudy and Hawaiian shirt. It’s a Hawaiian shirt that is gaudy. People who don’t know that write gaudy, Hawaiian shirt and I even see gaudy, Hawaiian, shirt, with a comma before the noun. (Tip: If you can’t swap the order of the adjectives, don’t put commas between them. It’s not a Hawaiian gaudy shirt, so no commas in gaudy Hawaiian shirt.)

These mistakes are harmless. No one is going to misunderstand what you’re saying about the shirt or the word “word.”

But other comma flubs are bad. None more so than leaving out the comma before someone’s name when speaking to them directly: Let’s eat Grandma. Add a comma and you have a warm invitation to break bread with a loved one. Without a comma, you’re Hannibal Lecter.

Bart Simpson affords us another example. It’s unclear whether “Don’t have a cow man” would be an interdiction against cannibalism or dating advice. Either way, it shows the importance of commas.

The rule here is that you should use a comma to set off what’s called a direct address — meaning when you call someone by name or another term that stands in for name, like “man” or “Grandma.”

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Pay attention to your email in-box and you’ll see that almost no one observes this rule all the time. “Hey Mary” should be “Hey, Mary.” But people usually put the comma after the name instead of before it. A victimless punctuation crime.

Because commas have many uses, they present many opportunities for errors. Appositives are an example. An appositive is a noun or noun phrase that restates something just mentioned. The house, a well-maintained Victorian, is on the corner. “A well-maintained Victorian” is a restating of the house — an appositive. Notice that it’s set off with commas.

Now think about the appositive rule in the context of “My husband, Ted, is at work.” With commas, Ted is just a restating of husband. But when you take out the commas, the meaning changes entirely. That’s because sometimes a noun that comes right after another noun is there to specify which thing you’re talking about: “I liked the movie ‘Star Wars’ and the TV show ‘Star Trek.’” The titles tell you which movie and which TV show. They narrow down the range of possible movies and TV shows being discussed. Notice there are no commas in these examples. Defining information critical to helping the reader know which movie you’re talking about takes no commas.

So, back to Ted. If I don’t put a comma in “my husband Ted,” I’m suggesting you need the name to understand which husband I’m talking about. As if I have more than one. A missed comma here reveals that the writer is a polygamist.

Proponents of the serial comma, which is the comma before “and” in “red, white, and blue,” use appositives to argue their point. They say examples like “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin” show how one more comma would make clear that JFK and Stalin were not strippers. But their argument falls apart when you change “strippers” to singular “stripper.” In “We invited the stripper, JFK, and Stalin,” the serial comma raises the possibility that JFK is the stripper.

These are just a few of the ways comma errors can change your meaning. Others crop up when you least expect them: “If after trying to install the shelf you are not lucky duck.” Then there’s the famous example about woman: “without her, man is nothing” vs. “without her man is nothing.” In every case, the lesson is clear: Watch your commas.

The writer is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].

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A Word, Please: Not a cannibal or polygamist? Make sure you use that comma

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