My abusive relationship with the common comma

Now some of you who have read anything I have written, be it here or on Facebook, twitter, Youtube description and/or comments, will probably have noticed, if you read the way I do anyway, my relationship with the comma. Yes, that little tadpoley character, a full stop with a tail, a dot that dangles, sometimes depicted as simply a line. I, as a writer, and I don't know if this is common, I haven't really noticed it elsewhere, hereby admit to abuse of the comma.

Ok, I'll admit, I may be overdoing it a little in my examples above, only three sentences but a rather grand total of fourteen commas between them, even if I do say so myself. I astound even myself in my addiction to the comma, I can never quite seem to finish a sentence without at least one of our little friends being called upon. I don't know why, I really don't. I think I use it in place of brackets more often than not, though in some of my previous posts here I have noticed an unconscious rise in the number of bracketed phrases. Brackets intrude, they stop the rhythm where commas can maintain the tempo with only a minor beat skipped.

I probably abuse the comma. Our current count is twenty two but I think now I'm too conscious of it, so I'm either cutting back or going over, I can't fully tell. I have to say, without commas, my writing would, in my opinion, be a lot more dull. Recently I've tried to mix it up, throw a semi-colon, the comma's haloed cousin, in there every now and again, though I have a suspicion that I use it wrongly far too often. Why was I never taught this? Dammit Irish education system, what do you have against the semi-colon? Are you punctuation-ist? Or are you, like me, inadvertently bent on using the comma as much as possible, abusing it repeatedly, safe in the knowledge that it will come crawling back for the next time you have need of it?

Little comma, how did we get like this? Our affairs used to mean so much, back in the days where I could barely string cohesive sentences together, never mind compound ones without the use of actual conjunctions. I think it was my father who taught me that, when you need to, you can use a set of commas to put a little note in the middle of a sentence when the sentence could maybe do without. Is he to blame for this relationship that we share? No, I think not. He could not possibly have foreseen the lengths to which I would so in my sentence elongating exploits, no one could have foreseen this monster we would, together, create. This is not a promise of changing my ways, oh no. I honestly think I'm too foregone to go back to the days when a sentence could last for less than twenty words, on average, and contain no commas. No, this is a cautionary tale to all who use the comma as loosely as I, all the writers who feel the need to fit as much between full stops as humanly possibly. Be kind to your comma. Appreciate it, love it because you know that you need it, no matter how much you may protest.

I'm sorry if this was boring to read, I'm in a weird mood, this was another of those aimless posts because I feel the need to put more writing on this bloggy thing. I thought it was funny. Final comma count: 55.

Embrace the Madness