Mathina Calliope came out of the Goucher College creative nonfiction MFA program with me a few years ago. She’s a crazy, salsa-dancin’, hip-shakin’, word-writin’ kinda gal and I think you’re gonna dig her guest post about that little wink of punctuation: the comma. She blogs here and DOESN’T TWEET ENOUGH here, but that’s neither here nor there. But, she is HERE dropping a grammar bomb from the heavens. Enter Mathina!
My freshmen composition students thought they knew what commas were all about. Commas peppered the students’ first essays like New England fall leaves: abundant, lovely, and ultimately destined for unloading. Then, we started looking at comma rules: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase. Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction to connect two independent clauses. Use a comma between coordinating adjectives not joined by and. Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives. Abruptly, comma insecurities crowded the room like monsters in a closet.
The students weren’t the only ones rendered suddenly unsure. I used commas correctly all the time, didn’t I? I mean, I had an undergraduate degree in journalism, a master’s in education, and another master of fine arts—in writing. I wrote test questions about comma usage. Christ. If I couldn’t explain why you didn’t put a comma after “Maryland” in “Jesse and I brought home Maryland blue crabs to throw in the pot for supper,” who could? And yet here we were, getting into the comma weeds, as it were, and the more we discovered, it seemed, the less we understood.
The conventions of written English generally come to native English speakers via silent absorption, the way language does, as we grow up reading all manner of texts, and witnessing, sentence after millionth sentence and word after hundred millionth word, just where commas do or do not pop up.
For nonnative English speakers and for nonreading English-speaking natives, however, commas confound, and the rules only seem to make it worse. Suddenly, it’s not enough to drop a comma in naturally, where one might pause in speech. No, now one suddenly needs to understand advanced grammatical terms: coordinating conjunction (not to be confused with subordinating conjunction), independent clause, clause, phrase. Yet, when one reads the definition of an independent clause—a group of words containing a noun “doing” a verb but not preceded by a subordinating word—rather than having things cleared up, one must now find still further definitions.
Frustrating, to be sure, but also complex and wonderfully mysterious, even tantalizing.
Any of us, if we have spent any time learning anything, has encountered this phenomenon. I first noticed it right after learning to drive. Never having considered all that went into coordinating steering, braking, accelerating, changing lanes, I viewed driving as nothing but a thing. But after one lesson, when I rode with a friend who safely and confidently merged into high-speed traffic, never interrupting her monologue about her prom date, I stared at her in awe.
Any skill or domain of knowledge with which we have no experience is necessarily opaque to us. As we peer closer, as we remove layers of opacity, we find not clarity but complexity. And this is what makes learning worthwhile, why it is inherently “fun;” it creates dissonance between reality and what we thought we understood. Our reward for resolving that dissonance is satisfaction—and an ever-greater appreciation for the richness that is life and learning.
Now to persuade my students that this is the case …
Mathina Calliope teaches English 111 at Northern Virginia Community College. Read more of her musings—grammatical and otherwise—at www.calliopeterpsichore.com
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