Are you comma crazy? [E] Do you love commas, or are you afraid of them? |
Greetings from the House of Mormont! By participating in a Writing.com activity called "Game of Thrones" , I am in no way endorsing the GoT franchise or identifying as a fan thereof. I’m here to help my team win Commas, commas! My good friend Joey is always complaining about “puppy toes…” We have a mentor partnership, and he often takes my written items and runs them through Grammarly and then tells me “girl, you’ve got 120 errors in this thing!” I used to panic when he said that; now that I’m equipped with Grammarly myself, I know that 99% of the errors they highlight are either commas, synonyms, or idiosyncrasies of speech and dialogue that would be silly to change into properly stilted English. I rarely pay attention to it, fancying myself to have a pretty good instinct for basic grammar. I do have a thing against commas… in my journaling I have a tendency to run sentences out as long as I can get them, separating thoughts with semicolons and ellipses, and commas seem to slow things down. I seem to generally avoid them, or else there might be a million of them sprouting like little tadpoles in my writing. As I’ve grown in my literary skills on WdC, I have developed more of an instinct for seeing where a comma would be needed to set apart clauses, such as in this case. But personally I’m more of too impatient to bother with them unless they’re absolutely necessary. The Oxford comma is a particularly irksome one. I grew up not using it at all; to borrow your example, I would write it as “red, white and blue.” But people here have told me to use it, and I’m pretty sure it’s built into Grammarly. I’m now beginning to see the logic of separating each item rather than running the last two together. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to spill our thoughts on this, it was fun and interesting to see that most people lean towards using too many commas. Take care and keep writing The views and opinions on this review are mainly the things discovered by the reader and therefore, do not reflect necessarily to the group, activity and/or event being affiliated herein. This is only the opinion and suggestions of the reviewer and it is still up to the author of this piece to consider this review as a corrective action or otherwise. "The WDC Angel Army"
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