I’m spending the day on my manuscript for Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites. Looking over my manuscript, I see that my editor and I have a disagreement over that little thing called the comma.
Grammar rules are fun. Some are hard and fast. Some change over time. Some are arguable. And some can be bent, especially in fiction: Comma splices can move action along, and sentence fragments create a punchy emphasis. Of course, they must be bent carefully and judiciously or the result is merely bad prose.
Serious writers must take interest in the mechanics of writing. If anyone tells you to “just write” and not worry about grammatical rules, that person is not serious. We have also done a great disservice to students in our school system, who no longer receive more than cursory instruction in grammar. This fact came home to me when I enrolled in a philosophy program and learned how important grammar is to clear thought: When people think, they think in words, and if they cannot use words clearly, they cannot think clearly. One of my professors, who was also a Benedictine monk, was a great lover of grammar, and he made this point to me. He had a poster on the wall of his office containing a diagram of the longest sentence ever written in English. He learned to diagram sentences in early elementary school.
One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve heard over my years is to review comma rules on a regular basis. I’m doing so now since I’m moving into the final edits on a manuscript. Besides, I’m infatuated with commas and tend to overuse them. One of my final editing moves will be to use Microsoft Word’s search function to find a group of words before which I habitually place commas in order to decide in each case whether they actually belong there.
But here’s an interesting issue: My esteemed editor has removed my comma every time I’ve connected an independent clause to another clause with the same subject using the conjunction but. Technically, according to most grammarians, she’s correct.
However, I get my comma usage from The Elements of Style, the classic by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White,which presents comma rules in a novel way. The original is available online for free. Although this little book changes every time it’s published, the fourth edition, which I have on my shelf, has the following:
When the subject is the same for both clauses and is expressed only once, a comma is useful if the connective is but.
Most grammar books indicate that a comma should be omitted if a clause following an independent clause, connected by a conjunction, has the same subject except in cases of extreme contrast. I think the rationale for Strunk’s rule above is that but, by its very nature, introduces contrast and should therefore take the comma.
The first sentence marked by my editor is this:
She rolled her eyes, but fished in her purse and handed him a coin.
The second clause has the same subject (she) as the first. Ordinarily, it would require no comma. The question of “contrast” is a judgment call, but I would say there is contrast here since the context is that she (Chelsea) is reacting in disgust to something Jake has said, but is acquiescing to it anyway. (And notice I just did it again in that last sentence.)
GrammarBook muddles the issue further with this rule:
If the subject does not appear in front of the second verb, a comma is generally unnecessary … But sometimes a comma in this situation is necessary to avoid confusion.
Gee, thanks.
It’s one of those cases where grammar gets murky. Having been several times through Strunk and White and having tried to put into practice what I’ve found there, I habitually use the comma in a case such as this, and now it looks wrong to me if the comma is omitted.
Ah, well. Decisions, decisions. At least this has me reviewing comma rules again, which is a good habit and a good thing to do while getting into the book’s final edits.
