It is largely true, I think, that most of us are comma happy—happy, that is, to bisect and trisect our sentences wherever we might hear ourselves taking a breath, either subliminally or aloud. Sometimes that heuristic works and sometimes, with real consequences, it doesn’t. But if we don’t use our ear, what other way is there to determine whether a comma is needed somewhere or not?
Let’s take this sentence I’ve modeled grammatically on one I saw last week in a major publication: My bank confirmed yesterday that I needed to provide further details about my stock investments, which performed poorly last year, despite their impressive ten-year average. Some believe (and I am one of them) that we are too ready to cut up our sentences because we fear producing a heavy, dense prose which will tax the reader’s attention. A comma here and there, we suppose, might thin things out and increase our chances that the reader will stay with us to the end.
That propensity to follow a hunch, however, is a mistake, because a jagged sentence which flails like a ragged flag in the wind is just as likely to weaken the reader’s perseverance by drawing attention from one concentrated center to a multiplicity of nubs in phrases and clauses across the sentence. Our example illustrates a fairly long complex sentence of twenty-seven words, with one independent clause governing two subsequent subordinate clauses. Because the main verb confirmed signifies the idea of saying or thinking, it triggers what is called indirect statement, and in English this often necessitates a noun clause beginning with the subordinating conjunction that: that I needed to provide further details about my stock investments. This first subordinate clause holds within itself another subordinate clause, which performed poorly last year, despite their impressive ten-year average, and it is the comma in this second dependent statement that is flapping in the wind here.
The word despite, meaning notwithstanding or in defiance of, is a preposition, and here its object is the noun average, or to include the three adjectives which modify that noun, their impressive ten-year average. The writer seems to have felt, consciously or not, that a comma was necessary to set off this prepositional phrase in order to make the sentence easier to comprehend by sectioning it; but this resulting prepositional limb of the sentence individualizes what is logically necessary to the preceding part of that same subordinate clause, and that logical isolation is sufficient cause to judge against it. The prepositional phrase (not just the preposition alone) works as an adverb, and the verb it is logically modifying is performed, the verb of the subordinate clause in which the phrase appears. To separate that phrase with a comma from the rest of its integral clause is to shake the logic of the sentence, not to break it outright, but to shudder it enough to make the reader wonder for a second too long about the connection of the two sections. And that logical wondering is just what clear expository prose has to avoid.
What makes all of this difficult is the fact that writing is not mathematics. Yes, there are, as we’ve just seen, objectively right and wrong answers in matters of punctuation, but then there are also decisions which, unlike the rigor of numbers, can only be made with reference to effect, what is called rhetorical punctuation. If, for example, that concluding prepositional phrase in our example included words that suggested a significant ellipsis, then a comma would be justifiable: and this despite their impressive ten-year average. This ends up constituting an entirely separate, though truncated, clause (and this decline in performance was in despite of their impressive ten-year average), and its emotional impact, the sustained surprise the current loss of value evokes in the writer, would be well served with the comma.
In writing, as in all the arts, even the political, rules are there to temper license and result in freedom. A balanced tension, always difficult to achieve, is still the real goal.
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In the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins on page 348 a sentence, “Nor had they asked (Fernanda)…” which then continues for two pages approximately 735 words with 90 commas. At the hands of this master the ideas do not flail in the wind, but they sore to the stars, mellifluous phrasing, balanced, and expansive, which, indeed, result in freedom.