A news story caught my eye this weekend. An American scholar has suggested that the comma could be abolished without harming the English language, according to an article in The Times.
This, I imagine, will cause some debate amongst academics, writers, editors and readers. John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Colombia University, argued that the internet and some modern authors are making the comma obsolete.
I have heard this argument against the possessive apostrophe, which causes so much confusion that we might well be better off without it. But commas? Surely not!
That was before I read that this ‘indispensable’ punctuation mark only arrived in Britain in the 16th Century, from Italy. And Jane Austen hardly used them at all in drafts of her novels, preferring dashes, which were later corrected when grammatical rigour became more fashionable.
In fact, as the leading article in The Times points out, comma rules are not a grammatical issue – spelling and punctuation are governed by conventions rather than inviolable rules.
These conventions are no more than tacit agreements of how to represent words on the page, and they change. For example, in letters we rarely put commas in address blocks or after the greeting any more. And the Oxford comma (comma before the last list item) is expected in the US but abhorred in the UK.
So how much should you worry about commas? I’d say it depends on your readers. If you’re writing a fashion blog for an audience largely under the age of 25, maybe not.
But for more formal documents, such as business reports and proposals, sticking to convention is safer. This is because decision-makers are more likely to be older, and bought up when punctuation ‘errors’ were considered a mark of ignorance. If they endured having their knuckles rapped at school for splicing a comma, they may not be so forgiving.
The other thing to consider is clarity. Comma rules, and indeed all punctuation, are a means to an end, and can be essential for meaning. Take these two sentences:
A woman without her man is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
If a comma makes your message less ambiguous, then use it.