The eyeballs are suffering from overload after attending to a pile of freshman drafts and another pile of literature papers asking me to think about "various different literary works" that display the influence of "various different isms," but here's the question that keeps running through my mind: where did all the punctuation go? I've long accepted the fact that many students don't know the difference between a colon and a semicolon or a hyphen and a dash, but now even the commas are disappearing. I see "however" plunked down in the middle of a sentence without its full complement of commas, and I see "for example" or "obviously" or "in addition" at the beginning of a sentence with no happy little comma following.
I have seen entire papers lacking any trace of commas, and I have seen several other papers that insert commas only where they are least welcome: separating a verb from its subject. I don't know how many times today I have read sentences starting like this: "The Yellow Wallpaper," is a story about....
What is that comma doing there? And why am I seeing so many examples of this annoyingly intrusive comma when other places are just crying out for commas but remain bereft? Today the Comma Fairy sits alone in her lair, where she sifts stacks of neglected commas while plaintively singing, "Where have all the commas gone?" Someday, though, she'll get tired of singing and step out to take vengeance on those who have so cruelly rejected her--or else she'll slowly wander off into the sunset arm-in-arm with the Hyphen Helper, the Semicolon Sylph, and the High and Exalted Annunciator of Ampersands. And I, for one, will be sorry to see them go.
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