lorri giovinco-harte

I recently asked a friend to review this site for any grammatical and/or mechanical errors. She is a former editor and has a meticulous eye and knowledge base. It’s pretty embarrassing to put up a site, declare oneself a writer, and then make blatant, grammatical mistakes.

My friend was kind enough to comb through the various posts and call me to discuss her findings. She started slowly at first, choosing to focus on small, stylistic errors. Once she realized that I was open to criticism, however, she let loose and started giving me a list.

Truth be told, I kind of had a feeling about what she was going to tell me – at least in part. Although I may not have wanted to hear it, I sensed that it was time to finally acknowledge the truth. I knew that my dirty, little secret was going to come out eventually. One can only hide these things for so long. Needless to say, I was almost grateful to have it out in the open. Acceptance, is after all, the first step.

You see, I am a commaholic, and I have been for most of my life.

I’m not sure why the comma has tortured me for so many years. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the punctuation mark since first picking up a pencil. There’s something about the squiggly, little character that makes me want to place it just about everywhere. Like someone who feels compelled to pour salt all over their food, I am powerless in my attempts  to comma everything.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’ve made many attempts to correct this behavior over the years. Through most of my college career, I sat with Strunk and White open on my lap as I composed my essays. Somehow, though, the established rules still escaped me, and I found myself inserting commas wherever it “sounded” correct. Knowing fully well that I was overusing the punctuation mark, I would then go back and remove some of them, thus creating new problems by omitting important ones.

What is it about the rules for comma usage that elude me?  I’m not going to blame my teachers. I am of a generation who learned grammar in school. We may not have been taught quite as comprehensively as possible, but we were taught, nonetheless.  I’ve read and reread the rules for usage ad nauseum and have even tried little mnemonic devices to keep them in my memory.  Despite all of my efforts, I still sprinkle commas whenever I hear a pause in my mind.

Is it genetic?  Am I predisposed to some kind of a comma compulsion? I guess I’ll never know.

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