"Alas, there are so many kinds of commas: those that lie like rocks in the path of a sentence, slowing its gait and requiring the reader’s heed to avoid a stumble; their gentler cousins, impairing a pell-mell flow of meaning the way pebbles slow a stream; commas that indicate a pause for thinking things over; commas enclosing phrases the way the small pockets in a purse hug hairpins or collect bits of loose change; commas that return us to our last stop, and those that some schoolmarm has insisted should be placed, like a traffic cop, between “stop” and “and."
William H. Gass’ ode to the comma, from a review of a collection of correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and the editors of The New Yorker, which appeared in the October 2011 issue of Harper’s.
#harpers
#grammar
