Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Breathing

The comma should give us pause. It indicates a short break in the sentence, just long enough to take a breath. Try reading what you have written out loud. Breathe at the commas.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation"?

Very funny!

Best,
Puk Degnegaard

Jonathan said...

You probably wouldn't want to breathe at every comma, especially those separating items in a list, or you'd sound asthmatic. Shouldn't you distinguish between commas separating whole clauses and those merely separating words in a series?