The Comma, Part 1

Time Spent: 2 hours.

I mentioned several weeks ago (I think) that I wanted to learn to edit better. Last Tuesday while I was on campus, I picked up a copy of "Adult Literacy in Writing" or something like that. It's a writing tool written by UIS professor Nancy Perkins and her writing partner Loren Logsdon. I had thought about getting it for a few weeks but hadn't gotten around to it yet, and I happened to visit Dr. Cordell for a few minutes about the AST last Tuesday.

Now let me preface this by saying that when it comes to punctuation, I'm pretty good. I'm not saying that I don't need to improve at all, because I do, but punctuation has always come very naturally to me (maybe because I read so much and absorb it that way). But I DO have my moments, and it's usually because of a stupid little comma. Dr. Cordell has noticed this too. She's not only the UIS supervisor for the AST, I'm also in her science fiction class, and we recently had an essay due where I had a few minor problems with commas. So her comment to me was to get that book because I don't want people feeling that my creative writing could have been better because of a few misplaced commas.

OK, Dr. Cordell, I get it. And I got the book. :::snort::: I hope, if Dr. Cordell is reading this, that she knows I respect her opinion AND feel comfortable enough with her to give her a really hard time. HA!

Anyway, back to my story - so I started reading through this and doing some of the exercises today. This REALLY brought me back to, hmm, fifth grade maybe? I could see myself sitting through language arts and being taught grammar and punctuation.

And so what did I learn? Well, I learned the rules to comma usage, which is really the most important thing. No, I'm not going to go through them here - suffice it to say that while I'm mostly good with punctuation, I do find time to include a few comma splices.

Please don't try to find them in this blog.