As we are just beginning our college writing careers, many of us are still running across problems with punctuation.  I myself am addicted to commas.  I often use them in excess, especially when pairing them with coordinating conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” and “for,” during transitions between related ideas where I could instead place semicolons or periods.  This can add to already comma-heavy sentences and/or make the sentences long and unwieldy, as I will demonstrate.  In addition, the repetition of “this, and this,” just like the constant barrage of “he/she said” discouraged in They Say, I Say, can become monotonous for readers.  However, I’ve recently found a strategy to help remedy this, which I will now share with you, that involves looking at sentence length and repetition.

To look at this strategy, we must first understand how the purposes of the comma and conjunction, period, and semicolon can be confused in transitions.  Commas are defined by the educational presentation “Conquering the Comma” as punctuation marking a pause in a sentence. The Little Seagull Handbook explains their most common use is being placed before a coordinating conjunction to join two independent clauses, phrases where “the subject and verb must form a complete thought” (Purdue). It’s important to note that when the two clauses involve the same subject, the second clause can be changed to a dependent one (unable to stand alone) by removing its subject, and only a conjunction with no comma is required to join the clauses, as The Handbook tells us.  So “I was dancing.  I was singing,” could be written instead as “I was dancing and singing.” In either situation, we’re “signal[ing] that one idea is ending and another is beginning (Bullock et al. 386).  The problem is that periods and semicolons serve the same purpose.  A period is used to separate independent clauses.  As for semicolons, these can be used to join two related independent clauses, according to The Handbook.  Due to this confounding, I’ve developed a two-part method in order to decide which one to use.

When you create two related independent clauses, whether with the same or different subjects, your first step is to choose whether to separate them into two different sentences by a period or to keep them together in one sentence.  This is determined by the length of the sentence up to that point.  If it’s already quite lengthy (around 3 lines), end it in a period and start a fresh sentence, whereas if it’s still quite short, a semicolon or conjunction with comma should be used (except for in the single subject situation).  Take for example this sentence from my Rough Draft of Essay 2: “Dr. Helen Epstein, author of the book The Invisible Cure about the issue of the spread of AIDS and the stigmas against its victims that come with it, actually mentions how peer pressure can reinforce stigmas and ignorance, as she complains…”  I made the mistake of using a comma between two actions of the same subject, and the sentence is long anyway, thus I replaced the “, as” with a period (and capitalized the s in “she”) to divide it in two.  By following this first step of the strategy, you too can prevent the creation of extra-long sentences.

But if the sentence is short enough to not require being split, you must utilize the second step and pick between the conjunction w/comma or semicolon (if there are two different subjects).  The Handbook offers a possible way to choose when it asserts, “If the two clauses are closely related and don’t need a conjunction to signal the relationship, they may be linked with a semicolon” (Bullock et al. 392), as with this example form Wayson Choy’s “The Ten Thousand Things”: “The silence deepened; the room chilled” (qtd. in Bullock et al. 392).  You can also look back at the rest of your sentence or paragraph to see if you’ve already used a ton of commas, coordinating conjunctions, or semicolons.  Commas tend to be most common, as they serve many more purposes.  I would often use commas for these other purposes many times in one sentence, and since one incident resulting in a sentence with six commas, I’ve made a pact to include no more than three per sentence.  Setting this limit will help you determine what your transition between clauses will be (if you find you need more after the transition, you may have to rephrase to exclude nonessential information).  This process has certainly decreased the number of commas I use and made my writing more direct at the same time.

I would like to note that the problem I’m addressing is not the comma splice, as all three punctuation methods are technically correct, but rather long and comma-filled sentences created by choosing commas w/conjunctions over the other two options.  My hope is that this lesson has helped you to understand the points of this punctuation and has taught you how to properly deal with related independent clauses so that you don’t repeat the same sentence structure too much.  I’ve also created a slideshow that you can reach below for a summary of this page and more examples.  Good luck!

Presentation: The Comma Calamity

Works Cited

Bullock, Richard, et al. The Little Seagull Handbook. W. W. Norton, 2017.

Graff, Gerald & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say, I Say, W-W Norton & Co., New York/London, 2016

Purdue OWL Staff. “Conquering the Comma Powerpoint Presentation.” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University, 2017, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/692/01/2017. Accessed 11 Nov 2017.