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?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Like Barbara was mentioning in class, I think a lot of the trending comes from how informal our speech and written correspondence is becoming. In conversation, we blend our words and sentences together, use words such as “sorta” and “dunno,” and throw in “like” a hundred times a minute. In writing, we contract words and substitute them for symbols or acronyms such as “lol,” “omg,” and “fml.” These habits which stem from informal writing, such as email, chatting, or texting sometimes make their way into academic writing. I was tutoring a student on his paper the other day and read the sentence, “The person I interviewed gave me like five examples of it.” Biting my tongue and politely suggesting that he reword the sentence, I realized that this may be part of how writing will evolve (or devolve?) with future generations. As we become less and less formal and academic in our writing styles, it may even become natural and understandable to leave out things like punctuation. I think that in the near future, both the choice of the writer and the level of understanding of the reader will depend upon how lax we allow our writing skills to become.
ReplyDelete