To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I have been fighting over commas all my life.
Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.
In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.
It gives the listener a good workout, to listen to the music, the same as it does us to play it.
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.