Commas Are Excerpted from Part 9, Editing and Proofreading
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DK HANDBOOK ©2008 Anne Frances Wysocki Dennis A. Lynch ISBN 13: 9780321420534 ISBN 10: 0321420535 Excerpt begins on next page >> The following sample pages on Commas are excerpted from Part 9, Editing and Proofreading. In addition to the material presented here, Part 9 also covers the following topics: • Grammar “The format is very inviting. • Sentence types and patterns I especially liked the comma section—the information is very • Parts of speech easy to follow. I wish I could use • Subject-verb agreement it immediately.” –Karen Taylor, Genessee Community • Fragments College (Advisory Board Member) • Comma splices • Run-on sentences • Dangling and disruptive modifiers • Shifts in voice • Shifts in tense • Punctuation • Mechanics Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc. PLEASE NOTE: These pages were prepared in advance of publication. Page numbers will not match those in published book. Additional changes may appear in the published book. COMMAS have four main uses. 1 2 USING COMMAS TO MAKE USING COMMAS TO HELP NUMBERS, PLACE-NAMES, AND INDICATE WHEN YOU ARE DATES CLEAR QUOTING (EXACTLY) THE WORDS To learn how and when to use commas OF SOMEONE ELSE in sentences like the following— To learn how and when to use commas in sentences like the following— Virginia’s population was 1,000,000 in 1830. It took eighty more years for “Hello,” she said, “can I help you it to reach its second million with that?” (2,061,612 in 1910). “The real problem with having a If you visit Emily Dickinson’s house robot to dinner,” argues Ellen in Amherst, Massachusetts, you Ullman, “is pleasure.” won’t see anything that truly belonged to Emily Dickinson. —or to learn about the following kinds of sentences (in which you aren’t quot- Abraham Lincoln was shot the night ing someone else’s words of April 14, 1865, and died the directly)— following morning. She asked if she could help me. ➔ GO TO PAGE 70. Ellen Ullman has argued that pleas- ure (or the lack of it) is why people don’t have robots to dinner. , ➔ GO TO PAGE 72. 68 PART 9 PERFECTING 34 USING COMMAS TO SEPARATE USING COMMAS TO BUILD WORDS THAT ARE PARTS OF SENTENCES THAT CONTAIN LISTS IN SENTENCES MULTIPLE PARTS To learn how and when to use commas To learn how and when to use commas in sentences like the following— in sentences like the following— At lunch I ate potato chips, a peanut To hear him tell it, the bananas were butter and jelly sandwich, a banana, not exactly conducive to a happy two cupcakes, and some barbecued stomach. eel. Her father, who was born in Saudi The stinking, reeking water roiled Arabia, always longed for the hottest down the street. days in August. She caught a cab, her breath, and Can you bring me the ladder, which then the flu. is in the backyard? He was livid, he was angry, and he You’d think it would be enough that was mad. she earned A’s in all her classes, but my roommate, a biomechanical ➔ GO TO PAGE 74. engineering major, also wanted to have the highest GPA on campus. He looked up at me, and he burst into tears. ➔ GO TO PAGE 80. WHEN SHOULDN’T YOU USE COMMAS? ➔ GO TO PAGE 89. COMMAS 69 NUMBERS COMMA USE 1 When you are writing numbers, use commas to separate the digits with USING COMMAS TO MAKE numbers higher than 999. NUMBERS, PLACE-NAMES, AND DATES CLEAR 1,000 (but 999) 2,304,504 $87,000,000,000 Note that the commas separate the long numbers into groups of three, mov- ing from the right to the left. How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how might I slow the days ahead? In 1889 more than 3,000,000 acres in the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, were opened to non-Indian home- steaders, so that a territory that had held virtually no non-Indians in 1880 had 730,000 in 1900. Here is comma use with large numbers when money is at issue: On the $65,000,000 bond sale, Mor- gan and Belmont made a perfectly legal profit somewhere between $1,500,000 and $16,000,000; no one outside the banks knew exactly how much. BUT! In the examples above, notice that there are no commas in numbers that represent years. It is also conventional not to use commas in street addresses: , 20419 West Second Street 70 PART 9 PERFECTING PLACE-NAMES DATES When you mention a location and the There are three common formats for larger place of which it is a part—such written dates in the United States: as a neighborhood in a city, a city in a state, a state or province in a country— separate the two place-names with 1 February 17, 1951 commas: When you include a full date—month, Neighborhood, city: Algiers, New Orleans day, year—put a comma after the day: City, state: Houghton, Michigan On January 26, 1950, the Constitution of India was adopted and gave many State, country: Oregon, United States powers to the individual states. Province, country: Tangier, Morocco In sentences: 2 17 Feb. 1951 In 1948, Adrian Piper, an artist and This format is for citing webpages in philosopher, was born in Harlem, the MLA style: New York City. Hayden, Teresa Nielsen. “Yo, Wocky Fela Kuti was born in Abeokuta, Jivvy, Wergle Flomp.” Weblog entry. Nigeria, to a middle-class family. Making Light. 29 June 2005. 18 Feb. ■ ■ ■ 2006 <http:// nielsenhayden.com/ makinglight/archives/006498.html>. To put a multiline address— ➔ See pages 000–000 for more informa- Habitat for Humanity/Metro Jackson tion on this use of dates. P.O. Box 55634 Jackson, MS 39296-5634 3 February 1951 —onto one line in your writing, put commas between the sections: If you are writing only the month and year, you do not need a comma Please send your donations to Habi- between them: tat for Humanity/Metro Jackson, P.O. Box 55634, Jackson, MS 39296-5634. In February 1912 La Follette delivered an angry, rambling, and—according Note that there is no comma between to some—drunken speech at an the state and the zip code. important dinner for newspaper pub- lishers, extinguishing whatever slen- der chances he had had for gaining the Republican nomination. COMMAS 71 WHEN YOU DON’T BREAK UP COMMA USE 2 THE SENTENCES YOU ARE USING COMMAS TO HELP INDICATE QUOTING WHEN YOU ARE QUOTING You can put quoted words at the (EXACTLY) THE WORDS OF beginning or at the end of a sentence. SOMEONE ELSE “Keep the hard hat on,” she said to me when we parked. When you embed someone else’s whole sentences into your own, use commas As the poet W. H. Auden put it, “The to separate the words you are quoting chances are that, in the course of his from the phrases that signal you are lifetime, the major poet will write quoting: more bad poems than the minor.” “I’ve got to sing,” he said, hoarsely. In the first case, notice that the comma comes inside the quotation marks and before the “she said” phrase. In the second case, the comma comes after the (equivalent of the) “she said” phrase, before and outside the quotation mark. WHEN YOU DO BREAK UP THE SENTENCES YOU ARE QUOTING You can break up the words of others for effect: “Why,” asks Jonathan Burt, “should the rat be such an apt figure for horror and the target of so much hatred and loathing?” Note that the first comma comes inside the quotation marks and before the (equivalent of the) “he said” phrase; the second comma comes after the (equiva- lent of the) “he said” phrase, before and , outside the quotation mark. 72 PART 9 PERFECTING WHEN YOU DON’T QUOTE A WHEN YOU DON’T QUOTE WHOLE SENTENCE WORDS EXACTLY This example use no comma before the When you refer to something that quoted words because the quoted someone else says but don’t use the words are not sentences. person’s exact words, you are using indirect quotation. In indirect quotation, She finally cobbled together some you do not use quotation marks or mumbo jumbo about a “man from commas. Very often, “that” introduces the West” who would “walk on the words that are being indirectly water” to the “East.” quoted. WHEN YOU QUOTE SEVERAL INDIRECT QUOTATION: SENTENCES Mr. Quiring has told me that essays The following example starts in the and stories generally come, organi- usual way, with a comma following cally, to a preordained ending that is “observed”—but notice that there are quite out of a writer’s control. two complete sentences being quoted, separated by a period. DIRECT QUOTATION: In class, Mr. Quiring said, “Essays The cop observed, “In the older and stories come to a preordained generations we didn’t even drink a ending organically—completely out beer. If your mom and dad smelled a of a writer’s control!” beer on you, oh my God, you might have to stay in for a year.” ➔ See pages 000–000 for help in thinking about how and why to In the next example, because the “he incorporate the words of others in your said” words break up the sentences academic writing. being quoted, the “he said” phrase is ➔ See pages 000–000 for more punctuated with a comma: information on using quotation marks to punctuate quotations. “It was the sociological nadir of the American spirit,” a Pepsi executive recalled. “Protests. Woodstock. Drugs. A surly and sullen generation occupying the dean’s office, burning it down—whatever it was.