onlyaworkingtitle:
upwithwhichiwillnotput:
Yes that’s right, I want to talk about commas, and ask your opinion too.
On Tuesday I received the marks for an essay I had handed, and it turned out that I had lost marks on ‘correct spelling and grammar’ which is a bit ironic since I run this blog about grammar. It turns out that what I had in fact lost marks on was supposedly missing commas in a sentence not unlike this very sentence you’re now reading. My tutor would have corrected my previous sentence to this: “…I had, in fact, lost marks…”.
This was not however an oversight on my behalf. Had I wanted commas there, I would have put them there. In my mind, the comma’s function is about reflecting where a short pause in a sentence would be, if it were spoken aloud.
In the sentence in question, and in my example above, if I had read them aloud, I would not have paused on either side of the ‘in fact’. That is why I did not use them.
My question is this: Is this non-standard English? And in an academic setting where standard English is expected, does this expectation go as far as dictating where one puts one’s commas?
I tried to respond in the response space, and hit the character limit. I tried the ask box, and hit the character limit. And so I must reblog.
My response:
I am always in favor of commas, wherever grammatically possible; however, I understand that not everyone feels the way I do about these remarkable little curls of ink. For example, some people might not even consider them remarkable! (Clearly they are wrong, for here we are, remarking upon them.)
In the case of “…I had _in fact_ lost marks…”, I consider it unquestionably grammatical to include commas (“, in fact,”), as the “in fact” is an aside from writer to reader — the sentence would be perfectly correct without it (“…I had lost marks…”). Same applies to your above sentence “This was not however an oversight on my behalf” — the “however” is an aside, and so should have parenthetical commas.
Still, as I said, I understand that not everyone loves the comma the way I do. In the case of these comma-droppers, I have conditional acceptance; as Robert Graves said, “Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.” Thus, if they know the grammatical rules (which you, Up With Which I Will Not Put, most likely do), then they have the artistic license to break them to rhetorical effect. If they do not know the grammatical rules, then breaking them only makes the writers appear uneducated.
So, it comes down to: Did you break the parenthetical-comma-rule for rhetorical effect? The effect achieved is a more conversational tone — you wrote it the way you would say it, as opposed to the way the style books mandate. Is this appropriate for a formal paper? My guess is not. Thus, I would agree with the professor marking the “in fact” as needing commas; however, since, as I said, you do have a good command of grammatical rules, I wouldn’t consider it worth lowering your grade over.
I threw that sentence with ‘however’ in that post for a bit of fun, because I did have another sentence with ‘however’ in my essay which was also corrected with a couple of commas around it.
Having considered this a little bit further, I think I have more understanding of why I didn’t use commas in these circumstances. We have three versions of these sentences:
…I had lost marks…
…I had in fact lost marks…
…I had, in fact, lost marks…
I am not opposed to the third sentence, and will happily use similarly comma’d sentences in other contexts. It’s just that to me we have two levels of interruption to the first sentence - a moderate interruption without the commas, and a more significant interruption with the commas.
The commas, implying pauses on either side, give more stress to the ‘in fact’-ness of the sentence, which in this case I didn’t want - I just wanted some low-level ‘in fact’-ness. However, when I want to give more emphasis to the ‘in fact’, then I will welcome the commas with open arms.
