Commas

My students are struggling with commas. I'm not sure if they are teaching grammar in school anymore; since my students admit they have no idea what diagramming sentences is, I suspect they are not. Grammar school no longer lives up to its name.

Yet, college students are expected to have learned grammar somewhere before they get to college and be able to write correctly. They are struggling, and I'm beginning to suspect that it's more from ignorance than laziness.

After class this week, a student asked me for the Cliff notes explanation of commas. He said that he didn't have any idea how to use them, so he had been trying to write most of his essays for me by avoiding them entirely. What?!?! How can a college student be so adverse to commas that he makes it his goal to write entire papers without any? Most likely, he still wasn't writing correctly, just failing to put in commas at all, let alone where they might be useful.

Anyway, I explained to him that English sentences are generally structured Subject-Verb-Object. He nodded, recognizing at least that basic organization. Then, I said that commas are used to indicate when something is out of order. If you start the sentence with something other than the subject, if you interrupt the flow of subject-verb-object with a word or phrase, if you move the parts of the sentence around, then you need commas. "Finally!" he said, "that makes sense." I added that commas are also used with conjunctions to join complete sentences, which he was aware of, though not always certain to do, and that commas are used to separate items in lists, which was the only way he was sure of using commas correctly.

Some students have been told the "put a comma where you would take a breath" rule. While I like the idea of this rule, the musicality of it, it doesn't work very well in practice. Most of these students end up putting commas all over the place and in very unlikely positions.

Overall, I recommend that my students read published material. If you want to learn how to use commas, read the writing of people who know how to use them. The best way to learn grammar is to read and let your brain absorb the structure of the language. That's how we did it as babies--we listened, we learned how to speak, and then we spoke. Granted, it's a little harder now that all of those language-learning neurons have been told to focus on other things, but our brains are still capable of grasping these structures far more easily than we can explain them. I mean, does any English speaker really know when to use "the" or "a" or not to use an article at all? I have trouble explaining it, but I have no trouble knowing when it sounds correct. Punctuation marks like commas do not appear in our spoken language so we can't "hear" how to use them the way we learned to speak. But if we read enough, we can still train our brains to figure it out.

And if that lazy method doesn't work, we can always think about sentence structure and whether or not we have disrupted the natural order of the sentence.