Might as well accept it: this blog is my cranking place! Sigh! Well, it is what it is, so here are a couple of peevish items for December:
First, here’s a sentence quoted from
an advance reader’s copy of a novel reviewers are asked not to quote (and I
take the liberty because I am not reviewing the book, and it came out in 1996,
anyway): “The olive-green river slid smoothly between the high ochre buildings
and the soaked terracotta roofs seemed luminous.” And yes, I would have used a
comma before the “and” that joins the two independent clauses of this compound
sentence. Why?
A visiting writer-researcher
in the midst of a book she intends to self-publish told me recently, very, very
firmly, that a comma was not necessary in a compound sentence. Oh, really?
Well, here’s my problem: I’m reading along and I see the subject-noun phrase
“river slid,” the preposition “between,” and then along comes “buildings,”
obviously an object of the preposition, and there’s that conjunction, and then
there’s another noun, “roofs,” and without no comma between the two independent
clauses, I’ve been set up to read “roofs” as a second object, i.e., “between
the buildings and the roofs,” which doesn’t make much sense, but that’s where
the punctuation leads me – and then along comes another verb, signaling a
second independent clause, and I have to backtrack and re-read the sentence!
Damn, that’s annoying!
Two paragraphs down the
problem occurs again:
“It was the ideal time to
walk about and look at the city and the Marshal and his wife were always
saying....”
You see what I mean? “It was
... time to walk .. and look at the city and –.” Huh? Look at the city and the
Marshal and his wife? No, not at all. Well, how much trouble would it have been
to use a comma before “and the Marshal”?
Writers who omit the comma in
the compound sentence are probably the same people who come to an intersection
and fail to signal their turns. Even if you are “following the highway,” how are other drivers
supposed to read your mind and know that? Which way are you going? Give me a
clear indication! Don’t leave me
standing here on the curb when I could have crossed safely, and don’t make me
read every one of your brilliant sentences twice, please.
The woman determined not to
use commas in her compound sentences was also planning to write a history book without an
index. Need I say more?
