Lately I have been reading a bunch of papers. I'm teaching a seminar course on evolutionary dynamics, taking a seminar course on multidimensional selection, and I am writing a paper on metagenomics that requires a lot of reading too. So I'm getting picky about commas. It's pretty annoying when people overuse them. I don't care whether there is a consensus that it's appropriate to put them all over the place - even if there is, it's still annoying.
People really like to put them after the first word or first few words in a sentence, as if some big a cumbersome sentence awaits, and for which we must be prepared by taking a deep breath for god measure. For example, one paper had this in the first line of the abstract: "Here we describe, the longest microbial time-series analyzed to date..."1 The hell? What is that comma doing there? Much more common is to write "Here, we cluster networks..."2 But to what end? What is the function of that comma? Are we not really doing it here? Here, we are?
What if I wrote the first paragraph like this:
Lately, I have been reading a bunch of papers. I'm teaching, a seminar course on evolutionary dynamics, taking a seminar course on multidimensional selection, and, I am writing a paper on metagenomics that requires a lot of reading too. So, I'm getting picky about commas. It's pretty annoying, when people overuse them. I don't care, whether there is a consensus that it's appropriate to put them all over the place - even if, there is, it's still annoying.
References:
1. Gilbert et a;, 2011, Defining seasonal marine microbial community dynamics
2. Rahat et al., 2007, Cluster conservation as a novel tool for studying protein–protein interactions evolution
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My MS thesis advisor is a master of the comma, and his markups of my first couple of drafts were peppered with little blue circles around commas that were unneeded (as well as a few little blue commas). I've absorbed a lot about comma-ing in this process.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a particular problem with excessive commas as long as they separate out logical grammatical parts of the sentence. For instance, I could have put a comma between "commas" and "as" in the preceding sentence, and I don't think it would have upset the flow or made it sound bad. It's not needed, and arguably the sentence is breezier without it, but that sort of comma does not hurt my brain.
ReplyDeleteIn the examples you gave, "Here, we cluster networks" doesn't bother me, because it partitions the sentence in a meaningful way. It's unnecessary, and probably better without (your analogy to the correct but incredibly awkward "Here, we are" is convincing!) but it doesn't interfere with my comprehension.
By contrast, "Here we describe, the longest microbial time-series analyzed to date" is a problem for me. It's not even whether the comma is necessary -- by partitioning the sentence in a way that does not correspond to its logical grammatical structure, it makes it harder for me to read and comprehend. That sort of comma kills me.
If they really wanted to inject a "pause for emphasis" into the prose at that point, a colon would have been more acceptable in my mind. Pompous and pretentious, sure, but it makes it a lot easier to parse the sentence than putting a damn comma there.
Here we describe... the longest microbial time-series analyzed to date!
ReplyDeleteMuch better.
If the offenders were your students you could institute a comma quotient, with penalties for use of more than, say, one comma per 100 characters (averaged over the whole text).
ReplyDelete