Essential guide to writing part 27

At the close of a sentence or clause, adverbial phrases are not generally punctuated: The party adjourned to the kitchen..... George Orwell Adverbial Clauses In initial position, when th

In writing these signals must be replaced by punctuation.

In business machines are built to become obsolete within a few

years.

In each case the object of the preposition can be misread as grammatically tied to the following word, as if the writers were talking about "writing these signals" and "business machines."

Within a sentence adverbial phrases are punctuated with

great variability What the phrase modifies, where it is placed, what rhythm or emphasis the writer wants are all important

A key consideration is whether or not the phrase is felt as an interrupter—that is, as intruding into the normal grammatical flow of the sentence If it is, set off the phrase by commas Interrupting phrases often come between subject and verb:

Jerusalem, of course, contains more than ghosts and architectural j

monstrosities Aldous Huxley 1

Barrett Wendell, in his admirable book on writing, points out that

clearness and vividness often turn on mere specificity.

Brand Blanshard

But they may come elsewhere:

And their former masters were, from the start, resolved to maintain

the old difference Oscar Handlin

Coughlin's activities were clearly, after Pearl Harbor, intolerable.

Wallace Stegner

Newspapermen have always felt superstitious, among other things,

about Lindbergh John Lardner

In such cases the writer is seeking clarity or emphasis The option is not so much whether to punctuate the phrase as where to place it Any of the phrases in the three examples above could be positioned, and more idiomatically, at the end

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and would then probably not need commas But placed where they are, they do require punctuation

At the close of a sentence or clause, adverbial phrases are

not generally punctuated:

The party adjourned to the kitchen Herbert Asbury

He was quiet and in-dwelling from early boyhood on.

John Lardner

Final adverbial phrases may be isolated for emphasis, though the technique quickly loses value if overworked:

They were not men of equal status, despite the professed demo-cratic procedure Harry Hansen And why is this picture an absurdity—as it is, of course?

George Orwell

Adverbial Clauses

In initial position, when they precede the main clause,

adver-bial clauses are usually punctuated:

If we figure out the answer, we feel devilishly smart; if we don't,

we enjoy a juicy surprise Charles j Rolo

When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

George Orwell

A writer has the option of omitting the comma after a short initial adverbial clause if clarity will not suffer (British writers seem to exercise that choice more often than do Americans):

When he describes the past the historian has to recapture the

rich-ness of the moments, Herbert Butterfield

However, the comma should never be left out if there is any possibility that readers will see an unintended grammatical connection between the last word of the adverbial clause and

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the first word of the following construction In the sentence below, for instance, a comma after "sail" would prevent read-ers from the misstep of thinking the writer is referring to "sail boats":

When you are first learning to sail boats seem to be very

cumber-some things.

Adverbial clauses in an interrupting position are

conven-tionally punctuated:

The whole thing, as he himself recognized, was a clean sporting

venture P C Wodehouse

On occasion, if no operations were scheduled for the next day, he

would be up early and out on an all-day hunt after getting only one

Or tWO hours of sleep Ralph K Andrist

Adverbial clauses in the dosing position may or may not be

punctuated The primary considerations are clarity and rhythm A comma generally helps readers follow the gram-mar, especially before clauses expressing a concession or qual-ification:

The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, although the judges could not agree on any one opinion Roger Fisher Now I seldom cuss, although at first I was quick to open fire at everything that tried my patience Richard E Byrd

On the other hand, some writers prefer to omit the comma when the main and the adverbial clauses are both short and unpunctuated within themselves The comma is often omitted

before because if the pause might seem overly emphatic:

Locke thought traditional theology worthless because it was not primarily concerned with truth Paul Johnson

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On one occasion, however, a following because-clzuse

should be preceded by a comma This is when it comes after

a negative statement and is intended as a straightforward ex-planation of that statement:

They did not elect him, because they distrusted him.

Without the comma such a sentence may be read as an ironic assertion that "they did elect him and certainly did not dis-trust him."

COMMA WITH ADVERBIALS

I Single-word adverbs

A Sentence adverbs: usually punctuated, whether in the initial, closing, or interrupting position

However, the people left.

The people, however, left.

The people left, however.

But there are exceptions

Fortunatelyi,) the people left.

The people therefore left.

B Adverbs modifying verbs and other modifiers: not punctu-ated unless they are in an unusual position, when a comma may be used for clarity or emphasis.

The people slowly left.

EMPHATIC {Slowly, the people left.

The people left, slowly.

II Adverbial phrase

A Initial position: punctuation optional

On the whole(,) the men were satisfied

B Closing position: not generally punctuated, though comma may be used for emphasis

The men were satisfied on the whole.

EMPHATIC The men were satisfied, on the whole.

C Interrupting position: punctuation conventionally required

The men, on the whole, were satisfied.

The men were, on the whole, satisfied

III Adverbial clause

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A Initial position: usually punctuated

When the sun went down, the women left camp.

OPTION WITH SHORT, CLEARLY RELATED CLAUSES When the

sun went down the women left camp.

B Closing position: not usually punctuated, though a comma may be used for emphasis or clarity

The women left camp when the sun went down EMPHATIC The women left camp, when the sun went down.

C Interrupting position: conventionally punctuated

The women, when the sun went down, left camp.

t> Comma with the Main Elements of the

Sentence

The main elements of a sentence—the subject, verb, and ob-ject—are not separated by commas except under unusual con-ditions Very occasionally when the subject is not a single word but a long construction, such as a noun clause, a comma may be put at its end to signal the verb (italics are added in the following examples):

What makes the generation of the '60s different, is that it is largely

inner-directed and uncontrolled by adult-doyens Time magazine

In such a sentence the comma between the subject and the verb may help readers to follow the grammar

Commas may also be used with the main elements in the case of inversion—that is, when the subject, verb, and object are arranged in something other than their usual order Some-times the pattern is object, subject, verb; if the object is a long construction, a comma may be set between it and the subject:

What he actually meant by it, I cannot imagine Aldous Huxley

The most frequent kind of inversion in composition occurs with the idiom "I think" ("I suppose," "I imagine," "I hope" are other variations):

4 I O PUNCTUATION

The lectures, / understand, are given and may even be taken.

Stephen Leacock

Lenin, on the contrary, might, / think, have seemed to me at once

a narrow-minded fanatic and a cheap cynic Bertrand Russell

In this type of sentence the main subject/verb is the "I think,"

"I understand." The rest (which contains the key idea) is a contact clause acting as the direct object, telling us what is understood or thought If the sentence were in straightfor-ward order, no comma would be necessary between the main elements:

I understand the lectures are given

I think Lenin might have s e e m e d

But when the "I understand" or "I think" is intruded within the noun clause, the subject/verb must be treated as an inter-rupting construction and set off by commas

f> Comma with Appositives

An appositive is a word or construction which refers to the same thing as another and is (usually) set immediately after

it When appositives are restrictive, they are not punctuated:

The argument that the corporations create new psychological needs

in order to sell their wares is equally flimsy Ellen Willis

In that sentence the clause is in restrictive apposition to the subject "argument"; it specifies "argument," and the noun would be relatively meaningless without it Notice that the

clause is not set off by commas (Sometimes, however, a comma is placed after such a clause—though not before—to

mark its end and signal a new construction.)

Often appositives are nonrestrictive In that case they must

be punctuated Usually such appositives follow the noun and

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should be preceded by a comma (and followed by one if they

do not close the sentence):

Poskitt, the d'Artagnan of the links, was a man who brought to the

tee the tactics which in his youth had w o n him such fame as a hammer thrower p G Wodehouse

The newcomers were pagans, worshippers of Wotan and other Teu-tonic gods Margaret Schlauch She was a splendid woman, this Mme Guyon w H Lewis

Appositives occasionally open a clause or sentence, thus preceding the word to which they are in apposition Then they must be followed by a comma, as in this example where

a series of three appositives precedes the subject ("Bishop An-drewes"):

A gifted preacher, a profound scholar, and a great and good man,

Bishop Andrewes was one of the lights of the Church of England.

G P V Akrigg

D> Comma with Absolutes

An absolute is a construction that is included within a sen-tence but is not really a grammatical part of that sensen-tence; it serves as a kind of loose clausal modifier

Nominative absolutes, the most common kind in

compo-sition, may precede, follow, or be intruded into the main clause In all cases they are punctuated (the absolutes are ital-icized in the following examples):

The savings of the nation having been absorbed by Wall Street, the

people were persuaded to borrow money on their farms, factories, homes, machinery, and every other tangible asset that they might earn high interest rates and take big profits out of the rise in the

4 1 2 PUNCTUATION

The bluffs along the water's edge were streaked with black and red

and yellow, their colors deepened by recent rains.

John G Neihardt

The official, his white shirt clinging with sweat to his ribs, received

me with a politeness clearly on the inner edge of neurosis.

James Cameron

Participial and infinitive absolutes are also punctuated: Allowing for hyperbole and halving the figure, that is still one hell

Of a p i l e of p u l p Pauline Kael

To revert for a moment to the story told in the first person, it is plain

that in that case the narrator has no such liberty .

Percy Lubbock

t> Comma with Suspended Constructions

A suspended construction occurs when two or more units are

hooked grammatically to the same thing It is really a form

of parallelism, but an unusual or emphatic form, which read-ers may find difficult Hence such constructions are often (though not invariably) punctuated:

Many people believed, and still do, that he was taking Nazi money

to run his m a c h i n e Wallace Stegner

Prescott and Parkman were willing, and Motley reluctant, to con-cede that the sixteenth-century Spaniard's desire to convert Amer-ican Indians had not been hypocritical David Levin

When the idiomatic phrase more or less is treated as a

sus-pended construction, it always requires commas to

distin-guish it from its more common meaning Usually more or less

signifies a qualified affirmation, and then is not punctuated:

He was more or less interested = He was mildly interested.

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But when more or less is used in a strict disjunctive sense— that is, to mean either more or less, but not both—it must be

set off by commas:

It is hard to say whether the payment for votes has become more,

or less, important Ronald P Dore

> Comma with Dates and Place-names

In American usage, dates are conventionally punctuated like this:

April 14, 1926

April 1926

In European usage the day precedes the month, in which case

a comma is unnecessary:

14 April 1926

In those place-names that consist of both a local and larger designation (state, region, province, nation), a comma is placed between the two:

London, Ontario

Kittery Point, Maine

The Dash

The dash ought not to be confused with the hyphen It is

a longer mark, and on a typewriter is made either by two hyphens (—) or by a single hyphen with a space on either side (-)

The dash has no function that is uniquely its own Instead

it acts as a strong comma and as a less formal equivalent to the semicolon, the colon, and the parenthesis As a substitute for the comma, the dash signals a stronger, more significant

4 1 4 PUNCTUATION

pause For that reason it should be used sparingly, reserved

for occasions when emphasis is really needed

t> The Dash Isolating Final Constructions

Dashes force an emphatic pause before the last word or phrase

of a sentence:

Our time is one of disillusion in our species and a resulting lack of self-confidence—for good historical reasons Barbara Tuchman

So the gift of symbolism, which is the gift of reason, is at the same time the seat of man's peculiar weakness—the danger of lunacy.

Susanne K Langer

t> The Dash Around Interrupting Phrases and Dependent Clauses

Dashes may set off dependent interrupting constructions such

as nonrestrictive adjective clauses, adverbial phrases and clauses, appositives, and suspended constructions In such a use, they create emphasis

After graduation from high school—where he [Charles Lindbergh] once wrote an elaborate and not uncomical satire on the finicky methods of his English teacher—he took three semesters in engi-neering at the University of Wisconsin, where the only thing that seemed to interest him much was shooting (he made the rifle team) John Lardner Occasionally—with a gun in his ribs, another in his back, and a gloating voice saying that in ten seconds he'll be dead—Hammer

does become a trifle anxious Charles j Rolo

Rotten logs can also be host to the ghostly glow of slime fungus, a plant that creeps—glowing—over the logs or along the ground.

Ruth Rudner Some of those writers who most admired technology—Whitman, Henry Adams, and H G Wells, for example—also feared it greatly.

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