comma overload

After discussing comma placement in the previous couple of classes, I’ve come to realize that I have got my work cut out for me. I definitely have an arsenal of bad habits that I had not been aware of until now. I had felt confident about my use of commas, but now I realize that in all forms of writing, I have been guilty of omitting commas. Take that last comma, for example (and that one, too). I would have loved to have deleted both of them because choppy, comma-polluted sentences annoy me when they are overdone. Unfortunately, my gut instinct is that the demands for academic punctuation require gross overpunctuation. In certain circumstances, I feel like a comma in an academic paper is like steeplechase, with a hurdle to jump over, followed by that big, empty void. The more commas I am obligated to add in order to be grammatically correct, the more I bog down my ideas with space and pauses, and it makes reading my own work feel tedious. However, I am glad to finally have a set of rules for words that require commas. FANBOYS, AAAWWUBIS and other mnemonic devices are helping me standardize my writing.

It is not a matter of when I WANT to add a comma, but more importantly when I NEED to, like it or not. Often in my education, (*unwanted comma*) I have been told that there are differences between formal academic writing and informal writing. I had always thought I distinguished between them, but now I am going to have to look over some of my previous literature papers and see just how many commas I omitted. With the inevitably missing commas, I understand the difference between “stigmatized” and “unstigmatized” grammatical issues, as my academic writing style is established with omitting commas, yet I don’t believe I’ve gotten comments from professors regarding these issues.

Question:
This is more of a broad question (and a little bit of wishful thinking) for thought and discussion: considering that commas, in some of their uses, are “trending out,” will that bleed over into academic writing? How much choice does a writer have to omit unwanted commas and not sacrifice the academic integrity of the paper?

Concision vs. Clarity

I am a bad English student. I say this in the respect that when I find myself confused with behemoths of confusing sentence structure, I stop my train of thought and simplify it. Rather than find a way to make such complex sentence structures work, I do what Barbara has said that over-critiqued young writers do: I shrivel up. At least, this is my perception of my writing process. Often, this comes when I find my sentence structure to be a maze of commas, or in many cases, a ridiculously long sentence, regardless of its actual legitimacy as a sentence.

If I look at my academic writing, particularly my theses for literary or historical analysis… they are BEEFY. When I read them, part of me says, “wow, those are some sentences,” and the other part of me wonders why I didn’t simplify them so that they were less rediculong. It comes down to the fact that I embrace concision, and a major part of that is avoiding complex, compound thoughts all represented in one sentence.

But what do I lose in the process of concise writing? I think I ignore opportunities to use more semicolons, hyphens, parentheses (which I use often in general writing but rarely in academic writing), dashes, ellipses and all of those gems of grammar. Aside from general hesitance of these things, I might also attribute their absence simply to preference; concise, accurate grammar and a clear message are valued goals that I shoot for in writing. Miles Davis lived by the concept that “less is more,” and I believe there is something to be said for clear, concise use of grammar as it applies to sentence structure. It certainly beats reading a sentence and having the sensation that you are running through a corn maze of grammar and syntax.

Question: I branched out of my shell in this blog! I used one of those ugly little semicolons, not because I wanted it to be an example, but because it actually made sense to me to use one as opposed to a period. Does this look like an appropriate use of the little bugger?