Comma Chameleon

Grammar nerds - the comma is hard to use. Most of the time it's misused.

From a piece on Book Riot...

The comma is the most misused punctuation mark in the English language. My source you ask? The school of correcting freshman grammar for a decade. The semi-colon is probably misused at a higher rate per attempt, but the sheer tonnage of misplaced and missing commas is staggering.

There are three main reasons for this:

1. They are the most frequently used punctuation mark, so they have the most opportunity to be botched.

2. It has a variety of uses, not all of which are consistent. Some of the usages are more stylistic decisions than grammatical imperative, which is doubly confusing.

3. We often use commas to signal a pause, which is not a grammatical unit. In our attempts to make our writing “read” better we use commas like salt, adding them to taste.

There are so many rules, gray areas, and exceptions in written English that it’s often helpful to know what the guiding principle of each punctuation mark is. The important thing to remember about commas is that their function is to separate, and the function of separation is clarity.