THE EDITOR'S DESK by Cheryl McGuire
Philosophically speaking, the comma cracks me up. Such a little thing, the comma. Editors know the rules and, pushing through, slap commas in and snatch commas out. But does that cavalier swoop take the high or the low road?
I ask you, writers, the comma—friend or foe? Raise your hands. How many of you feel an abstract comma angst? Or are you one of the lucky fellows who follows a set of rules and hastens upon your merry way, nary an after-thought granted that little curlicue?
For those tortured by that puny dab of ink, that bit of flourish, that miserly spiral stroke, you’re not alone. Oscar Wilde lamented, “I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”
We all agree on the practical comma—Let’s eat grandma. Let’s eat, grandma.
The torture kicks off with the artistic comma and with—for some of us—the wide-splash-of-color impulse to go for broke and remove all commas, the way freedom lovers shed girdles and neckties. Of course, skill is required to avoid mucking it up.
A woman, without her, man is nothing.
A woman without, her man is nothing.
A woman without her man is nothing.
Should we be rule tenders and pencil-pushers, dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s? Or bold swashbucklers—artists painting with marks and letters and experimenting in the realms of nuanced meaning? And what is one to do with the nagging of one’s computer weighing in with blue-line criticisms, gung-ho to corral the grammarian renegade guilty of rebellious ineptitude? Gertrude Stein would sniff, “Punctuation is for the feeble-minded.”*
We know what E.E. Cummings would say and James Joyce. Dickens just went ahead and did what he wanted: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was . . .”, while Pulitzer-prize winner Cormac McCarthy chortled, “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma . . . I mean if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”*
My guess is Faulkner—that pipe-smoking, two-time Pulitzer-prize winning author and Nobel Laureate—might know a thing or two about commas/no commas with, say, Sound and the Fury.
But I must give credit where credit is due. The novel and author in front of me who most recently riled my constant comma contemplation was People verses Kirk by Robert Traver, the pen name of John D. Voelker—a small-town lawyer in 1934, elected prosecuting attorney and DA (during which time he lost only one felony case), appointed 74th Justice of the Michigan State Supreme Court in 1956 (during which time he wrote more than 100 opinions), and acclaimed author in 1956 of Anatomy of a Murder (62 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List).
One final, hopefully hopeful, point: According to May Huang and her list of Top Ten Authors Who Ignored the Basic Rules of Punctuation, “. . . just goes to show how keeping up punctuation norms isn’t a prerequisite for literary success.”*
Swashbucklers unite!
*From the online article Top Ten Authors Who Ignored the Basic Rules of Punctuation by May Huang
