Proof reading isn’t my notion of fun. All those periods, commas, and quotation marks. [Notice that the preceding words “All those . . . marks.” do not a sentence make—there’s no verb.] It’s okay for a novelist trying to create rhythm and variety to write like that. But you’d better not turn it into your English teacher like that.
And should there be a comma after a conjuction [i.e., ‘and’ or ‘not’] when it begins a sentence, and isn’t the beginning of a clause? As I understand it, if you’re ‘comma happy’ and want to be safe, you put it in, but it’s not necessary.
The problem is that when I’m writing, my mind always focuses on plots, characters, and dialog. I don’t notice the other stuff—which is what get’s me in trouble and slows down the process of getting a book from an idea to a published form.
For starters, commas drive me mad. When I was in graduate school, an eminent professor, whom [Look how smart I was—I used ‘whom’ not ‘who.’] everyone respected, told us: “Forget the comma before the ‘and’ in a series. Why do you need it? The word ‘and’ serves the same function. Use ‘and’ or a comma but not both,” he said. So when I used to write “Suzie had lots of flowers, music and art,” I left off the comma between music and art. That’s a no-no according to the Chicago manual of style.
Then there’s that nasty adverbial clause. When it’s at the beginning of the sentence, [like the preceding eight words] it needs a comma after it. But no comma is needed when it comes at the end of the sentence. Who made up these rules? And if you really want to get esoteric, there’s a difference between an adverbial phrase and an adverbial clause. Know what it is?
And quotation marks? Sure, put one in when a character starts talking, and put one in when he stops. But what if he is talking for more than one paragraph with no interruption? The rule says: A beginning quote [“] at the beginning of each paragraph of the quote and one at the end of the last paragraph [”]. There should also be a beginning quotation mark at the beginning of each subsequent paragraph that continues the quote, but no quotation mark at the end of the paragraphs in the middle of the long quote! It looks funny. It looks like a mistake—“Gad, that Hutchins guy doesn’t know how to write, or at least he didn’t proof read very carefully. He forgot a quotation mark at the end of this paragraph.
“But he put one at the beginning of the next one and at the end here.”
I sometimes get around it by starting the second paragraph with something like [Mac continued, “Let the good times role. . . .”] Then, I can put an end quote at the end of that paragraph.
If you want to see how bad it can get, you should see how hard it is to punctuate some of Lawrs’ quotes. [He’s a character in my books who tells farmer jokes.] His favorite character is a farmer named Homer. When Lawrs tells the joke and I break it up into several paragraphs, to be technically correct, I don’t put an end-quote [”] at the end of each paragraph in the multi-paragraph quote, but if the paragraph ends with a quote from Homer, he gets a single quote [’] at the end of that paragraph. If you’re confused, so am I. My work-around is to have the story be one long, single paragraph containing Lawr’s story, with individual quotes from Homer breaking it up with single quote marks. I don’t like that solution, however, because I don’t like long paragraphs. [Just try reading Henry James.]
Then there’s the problem of two independent clauses within a dependent clause: “When the morning sun came up, and the moon had disappeared, the rooster crowed.” Should there be a comma after “up?” I guess so, but even the Chicago manual of style, which runs more than a thousand pages, doesn’t address the problem.
That’s why proof reading is no fun!
Oh, man, now I have to go back and proof what I just wrote! I’ll bet there’s an English teacher out there somewhere who will find an error. How about it, Miss Jeffrey?