Making sense of commas

Commas are an integral part of spoken and written communication. The use of commas allows for the speaker, or the reader to make a pause without ending the sentence. Communication would be very hard and ineffective without commas and other punctuation marks, as speech would be continuous and non-stop, without any differentiation between one topic and another.

A comma is placed inside a single sentence, in other words, the placing of a coma does not mark the end of that sentence, but rather a pause. Sometimes full stops(.) and comas(,) may be interchangeable, so a good writer should know how to make good use of such tools.

For example:
“I will bathe, then have lunch and, finally, I will go to sleep.”
and
“I will bathe. Then have lunch. Finally I will go to sleep.”
are both correctly written and express the exact same thing, but the latter sentences are too short. In such cases a writer has the option of using a (,) instead of (.). Such sentences are known as compound sentences. Compound sentences are a single sentence that is composed of smaller individual sentences that could be, but do not need to be, independent sentences or simple sentences.

Another example of where a (,) should be placed is when naming multiple objects. For example:
“The cow, pig, horse and goat all live in the farm.”
If the previous sentence had no use of commas the sentence it would be necessary the use of “and” continiously between one animal and the next.
“The cow and pig and horse and goat all live in the farm.”
Such sentence would sound redundant.

Proper use of the tools of language is very important in the ability to correctly express ourselves, such as commas and and other punctuation marks.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.