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Wednesday, March 8, 2017

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.

3 comments:

  1. I think this is less a problem of punctuation and more a problem of sentence flow, at least as you've presented it here. I mean, "at that moment" is the glaring sore thumb in the first example, not the commas that are so necessary to set it off from the rest of its sentence.

    Of course, I say this as a tireless advocate for commas. :V I'm reading a story right now where one of the first lines in my notes is "I NEED MORE COMMAS, JIM". iisaw's Celestia Code quadrilogy wouldn't have nearly enough commas were it not for me spitting them at him like so many watermelon seeds.

    Commas are our friends. Love the comma. Trust the comma. Or, in other words, git gud, scrub. V:

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    1. Yeah, there's definitely a middle ground. You want the commas you use to be correct, but there's an art to making them feel natural. I think it also depends on the type of narration. Omniscience (and to some degree, past tense), lend themselves to a less immediate feel, where the prose has more time to consider what it wants to say and arrange the sentences more accordingly, though shifting things around to get rid of commas doesn't always make things flow better, since the order may make more sense one way than another. A lot of times, clarity is the most important thing, and if that requires more commas, so be it. More often, it's about removing things that don't need to be in the sentence at all. However, once you go to a highly limited narrator (and to some degree present tense), having this kind of choppy, disjoint feel can work to your advantage, since it sounds more like an authentic thought process, where the narrator hasn't had time to gather up and organize what he wants to say. Not all comma pauses are created equal, and there's an intuitive sense while reading that some of them are longer pauses than others. For me, the key is watching out for the longer-pause ones. Take a first-person narrator in the middle of action. This can be an effective place to use intentional comma splices to create a sense of urgency, so you may have four or five clauses and fragments all tacked together, and if you create the right atmosphere around it, it works well. The aside kind are the ones that throw up the biggest speed bumps (and there's a whole other topic of what kinds of asides work best with commas versus dashes), and if I see a lot of those, variety is usually the key. If a sentence has four of them, but they're all a different type, it still makes the sentence interesting, but if all four are absolute phrases, then you have a repetition problem, and such commas can help key you in to those.

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  2. My Comma Deficiency Syndrome often results in a lack of technically required commas, but when those commas are put in, they can also cause the Shatner-like, herky-jerky flow mentioned by Chris above. It really is a balancing act, and I think learning to write complex but flowing prose is the real solution.

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