OUT OF OUR ELEMENT with Dan Malossi and Lauren Roedy Vaughn

The Players:

LRV = Lauren Roedy Vaughn

DM = Dan Malossi

LRV: I was helping a dear student (who struggled with all things language-based) study for a comma usage quiz. With all kinds of confusion-creases on her face, she asked, “Is this something I’ll need to know next year too?”

Commas aren’t quadratic equations. They are going to show up…a lot. I had to burst her bubble. 

I said, “Yep. Until you are a college professor, you’ll need to know them.”

Her shoulders slumped. 

“Hey, but the good news is there are rules! We can learn them…”  

This hope was unlike what one of my college professors gave to me—which was agita. She told our class she would “hold us accountable for every misplaced comma” in our papers. I felt okay about this proclamation, naturally, because I’d learned the comma rules. 

However, I hadn’t learned the one rule that counted at the time…my professor’s comma mantra: “Put one wherever there is a pause.” (She wasn’t an English professor, alas.)

I’m pretty sure she conjured that rule out of thin air. Her class caused me a lot of angst, to say the least. Dan knows even more about comma rules than I do. His head would have exploded in this class. 

I just kept going to her office hours where she’d tell me where, exactly, in between my words, she was pausing, as she read, and I’d put commas there. Sometimes rules should be flouted. No doubt. 

Other times, silly rules should be followed in order to earn a graduate degree.

But my student had a list of real, tried-and-true comma rules to learn, and I was on board to teach her.

“These are meaningless,” my student said. 

Then I wrote: “I love cooking my family and my pets.”

She looked at me, her nose all scrunched up. 

“Don’t worry. I’m not a psycho,” I said. Then I wrote, “I love cooking, my family, and my pets.” 

Sometimes the rules really matter…in a meaningful way.