Keep Your Pants On

I don’t think the comma is unnecessary. I do think we could use less of them. Maybe a lot less. A bunch of them seem there for convention rather than because they affect comprehension. Punctuation should only exist to facilitate understanding.

I think I’m feeling this issue a little more than is totally reasonable right now because I’m in the middle of proofreading this book. I have a tendency to leave the commas I feel are extraneous out. So in the proofing process I spent a not totally reasonable amount of time staring at sentences thinking, “That doesn’t need a comma. It’s perfectly clear.” But then when I go to move on a part of my brain says, “Yeah, but you wrote the sentence. Of course it’s perfectly clear to you.” Makes me really feel that Oscar Wilde quote: I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. I’m just glad I’m not a poet.