Count your commas!

Commas are a way of separating sentence content from the rest of the sentence. You may not separate a subject from its verb. You can do other things with a single comma, though. As single comma, usually after the first word in the sentence, can be direct address. That’s when you name the person or thing you are speaking to. (Charlie, get out of bed!) It can also separate something parenthetical, such as a conditional clause. (If you don’t get out of bed now, you’re going to miss the bus!) A single comma can also separate something called an appositive. An appositive is renaming something; it’s equivalent to an equals sign. Here’s an example of that from a recent Bizarro comic. Read the apron. I confess I’m not much into rock and roll, so I just barely know that “Kiss” is the guy’s name. Or something.

What about two commas? The rule in writing is that you don’t separate a subject from its verb with a comma. But you may use two commas. Two commas enclose a parenthetical remark. Since it’s parenthetical, it doesn’t count as part of the sentence. Let’s modify the above:

Kiss, the cook, sports a rather unconventional appearance.

You can take out “the cook” and you still have the main sentence. Do not say, “Kiss, the cook looks rather unconventional,” unless you’re talking to Mr. Kiss about a cook.

A little more about parenthetical remarks: You can make them three ways. I already mentioned commas. Use commas for a minor aside. Use parentheses (which I use rather often in my writing) for remarks that are somewhat off topic. Finally, use M-dashes—very handy to know how to use—to emphasize the importance of the remark. You make a M-dash by holding down the Alt key while you type 0151 on the numeric keypad. Mac users, you’re on your own, and some word processors have their own way of making them. I’ll belabor the point:

Kiss (did you know he can cook?) is pretty good with a barbecue grill. Kiss—he is actually a very good cook—served up some excellent spare ribs.

A final parenthetical remark: You really should kiss the cook.

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Lynn Margulis, a famous evolutionary biologist died recently. Here’s a sentence from an article about her.

 She was also a major contributor to the Gaia theory, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating complex system, and was once married to astronomer Carl Sagan.

Lynn Margulis

The rule in English is that you never separate a subject from its verb with an odd number of commas. This sentence has a compound predicate, so you have a subject and verb before you get to the first comma. So the sentence is grammatical as it stands.

I’ll get into this more in a future post about the sin of pretentiousness in writing, but you need to have a comma before “which.” “Which” and what comes after it is really an aside, supplying extra information about the Gaia theory.

After the second comma you find a verb but no subject. What’s the subject? Normally you go back to the first suitable noun, in this case, Earth. Carl Sagan was an unusual person, but I doubt the earth was married to him! That second comma to the rescue—it ends the aside and makes you jump clear to the front of the sentence.She and Carl were married. Still a pretty interesting situation, but at least possible.

Editorial comment: That aside is so long, it somewhat separates the second verb from its subject, even with the comma. Maybe they should have changed that last comma to a period and made a second sentence starting with “She.”