Nidhi Mukherjee, 1/15 Week 9 - Let's Eat Grandma

Commas are beautiful. I know that. You know that. All APEng students know that.

Unfortunately, little—perhaps even naive—9th-grade me did not realize that. In fact, I was almost notorious for having run-on sentences and comma splices in my English 9 Honors writing assignments. Now, I’m not really one to shift blame (that’s a blatant lie), but I—you guessed it—shifted blame to the number of sentences we had to write. Or how I was unaware of certain comma rules. The list just goes on and on.

Rhinoceri, presidents, and Oxford Commas - courtesy of WordPress.com

But then, amidst all the grammatical chaos and comma errors, I saw the divine, holy, sublime—even—Oxford Comma. I don’t know why—in fact, I don’t know to this very day—but something inside me just clicked. It was almost as if I found solace in the very thing that used to decrease my English 9H writing grade (quite the anti-reliever). 

And that’s when I started suffering from this thing that can be best described as “Chronic Overuse of Commas.” No, seriously, I put commas before conjunctions, after conjunctions, used them as quotes, and even went on to replace periods and other punctuation with them. 

Only in texts, of course. 

I’m not irresponsible enough to tank my writing grade due to my personal preferences for commas. In fact, my writing grade was thriving after I fixed my comma errors (largely because most of the points taken off were for such errors).

Use commas, save lives. Courtesy of Teacher Charlie from Facebook

So, the next time we think about commas in writing, let us not eat grandma—instead invite her to a lovely dinner—as we refrain from making grammatical errors associated with commas.

Comments

  1. Suhas BathiniJanuary 22, 2025 at 9:21 PM

    Hi Nidhi, I really liked the style of your writing and inclusion of humor. I can completely connect with you on your overuse of commas; I think we’ve all been guilty of adding too many commas, creating comma splices and run-ons. Your examples of how the lack of a comma creates ambiguity and can potentially be interpreted in an entirely different way were great and I especially loved the visuals you added with them. One real world event that showed the true importance of commas was in 2017 when a delivery driver sued for $10 million due to ambiguity created from the lack of a comma in the wording of the jobs that do not qualify for overtime pay in a law. Overall, you had a great blog post and I love the humor you ended off with as well.

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