The comedy of commas is that it is a comedy of errors. A Comedy of commas

A little joke, courtesy of shakespeare CASSIO: Doest thou hear, my honest friend? CLOWN: No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you. - Othello

Eats, shoots & leaves Here’s another joke for you: A panda walks into a café. The panda orders a sandwich, eats it, and then fires a gun into the air. On the way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked “Panda.” Whereupon the bartender reads: “Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

EATS, Shoots & leaves This joke inspired the title of a surprise best-seller: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss

Eats, shoots & leaves The book “leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as ‘our long-suffering little friend’; makes a rousing case for the semicolon’s usefulness in, among other things, ‘calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention’; and describes Woodrow Wilson’s inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called – spectacularly undermining his own argument – ‘the most un-American thing in the world.’” “Writes, Punctuation Book and Finds It’s a Best Seller” (Sarah Lyall, The New York Times, 1/5/2004)

What is a comma splice? A comma splice is one kind of run-on sentence in which two independent clauses are incorrectly joined by a comma (instead of separated by a period or a semi-colon). Example: Ms. Gallin pretends to be angry when we joke around, her smile gives her away.

WHAT’S AN INDEPENDENT CLAUSE? Quick review from last year’s grammar lessons: An independent clause is a string of words that can stand on its own as a complete sentence. Key word: “can.” You can link independent clauses together, with appropriate punctuation and connector words, to form more complex sentences. You need 3 things to form an independent clause: A subject (who or what is doing the action) A verb (the action, including forms of “to be”) A complete thought (this might require an object)

Warm-up: are these independent clauses? the boy ran jumping the gun suddenly time stopped however long it takes Darien High School sophomores rule I contacted we went through

Find the comma splices! Here’s a modified passage from Catcher: At the table right next to me, there were these three girls around thirty or so. The whole three of them were pretty ugly, they all had on the kind of hats that you knew they didn’t really live in New York, one of them, the blonde one, wasn’t too bad. She was sort of cute, the blonde one, I started giving her the old eye a little bit, just then the waiter came up for my order.

From splice to nice Here’s the actual passage (p. 69): At the table right next to me, there were these three girls around thirty or so. The whole three of them were pretty ugly, and they all had on the kind of hats that you knew they didn’t really live in New York, but one of them, the blonde one, wasn’t too bad. She was sort of cute, the blonde one, and I started giving her the old eye a little bit, but just then the waiter came up for my order.

So, how can we avoid comma splices? Insert a conjunction after the comma Ms. Gallin pretends to be angry when we joke around, but her smile gives her away. Change the comma to a period Ms. Gallin pretends to be angry when we joke around. Her smile gives her away. Change the comma to a semicolon Ms. Gallin pretends to be angry when we joke around; her smile gives her away.