The Agony of Excessive Commas

I want to talk about something I see in fanfiction with some regularity: overuse of commas.

Not, mind you, incorrect use of commas; that's another matter altogether, and one that can be much more easily (or at least, more prescriptively) fixed.  No, I'm talking about technically correct sentences which, nevertheless, have too many commas--not too many for accuracy, but too many for aesthetics.  Head down below the break for some explication, and why not to do the thing I don't want you to do.



Let's start with a premise: there is an artistic element not just to storytelling, but to writing itself.  Not all writing is (or needs to be) artistic, certainly... but in fiction, artistry is always the goal.

"Artistry" can take many forms; the staid repetitiveness of Octavia Butler's works is a deliberate evocation, for example, just as Catherynne M. Valente's purple turns are an intentional shibboleth of Victorian writing--or rather, modern impressions of the same.  So this isn't a question of style, per se.

Rather, it's about crafting prose which is unobtrusive (except when you want the reader focussing on the words rather than their meaning), clear (except where you want to be opaque), and synergetic in tone and style with your narrative material (except where you're trying to draw a distinction between the two).  Clear as mud?  Good.

Now, let's get to the commas.  Having established that just putting them in the right places isn't good enough--having established that they need to contribute to the flow of an artistically successful phrase, sentence, paragraph, scene--let's look at a particular problem that can easily crop up.  Consider the following sentence, which I just made up:

I didn't, in retrospect, know exactly, at that moment, what I was in for.

 This is a technically correct sentence.  It's also ungainly as sin.  Part of that is that not once, but twice, it cuts into its main thought with a temporal descriptor.  But also, it's piling four commas into one mid-size sentence.

A comma is like a speed bump; putting one in the right place can do wonders for regulating traffic (and can slow down first responders, but luckily, we are assured by the great philosopher Tupac Shakur that "Words Never Die").  Throwing up too many, however, brings everything to a crawl.  In my example sentence, you're stopping the reader four different times in short space... and for what?

(I'll pause here to note that the commas in a list are in a bit of a different category than what I'm talking about.  Consider this advice for excessive non-list commas in fiction writing, if that satisfies your inner pedant)

The easy solution here is to quickly rewrite the sentence.  Take a look at this:

In retrospect, I didn't know exactly what I was in for at that moment.

Exact same words, and one-quarter the commas!  And it reads much better; the "at that moment" is still at least somewhat redundant (though I can imagine contexts where it would communicate relevant information not conveyed by the rest of the sentence), but the flow is greatly improved.  This can apply to whole paragraphs, too.  Look at this:

Once, when I was young, I thought that everyone was mean.  It wasn't true.  I didn't know it, not then, but I was projecting.  People, I thought, were bad, because I wanted to do bad things, and if I wanted to do bad things, then other people must want to, too.  It didn't occur to me until much later that, much as I didn't act on those impulses, so could others be good people despite the occasional crude or malicious thoughts.

Here, let's look at it again with the commas and periods highlighted, so that it's easier to see what I'm talking about at a glance:

Once, when I was young, I thought that everyone was mean.  It wasn't true.  I didn't know it, not then, but I was projecting.  People, I thought, were bad, because I wanted to do bad things, and if I wanted to do bad things, then other people must want to, too.  It didn't occur to me until much later that, much as I didn't act on those impulses, so could others be good people despite the occasional crude or malicious thoughts.

Now, having a combination of short and long sentences, as we have here, can be effective; it calls attention to the shorter ones, which is why you might put something punchy and important between longer passages.  That's why "It wasn't true" works here; it's short, it's important, and the former highlights the latter.

BUT, it combines with a choppy follow-up sentence to create eight breaks surrounding eighteen words, which is just silly.  Read out loud, "It wasn't true. I didn't know it, not then, but I was projecting. People, I thought, were bad," out loud, and see how stilted it sounds by the time you get to the end of the phrase.  Let's look at a rewritten version:

Once, when I was young, I thought that everyone was mean.  It wasn't true.  I didn't know it back then, but I was projecting.  I thought that people were bad, because I wanted to do bad things.  If I wanted to do bad things, then other people must also want to.  It didn't occur to me until much later that, much as I didn't act on those impulses, so could others be good people despite the occasional crude or malicious thoughts.

Note that I haven't eliminated every possible comma from our new example; I could get rid of at least two more without significantly altering the wording, let alone the meaning.  What I have done is move around a few phrases--putting an aside at the start of a sentence where it doesn't need to be bracketed off, splitting one longer sentence up, and the like--to create a paragraph where close breaks indicate key phrases, and readability is improved.

Over-comma-ing is an insidious mistake, because you can write perfectly accurate sentences which are nevertheless distinctly subpar.  It's also one that many editors struggle to identify, because again, nothing's explicitly wrong.  But being able to identify unnecessary comma clusters and bust them is a great way to help keep your prose engaging.