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it's very tempting to overuse the comma
oftentimes when we speak we pause a lot
in our speech and so when we write we
want to pause a lot as we're writing but
oftentimes those pauses that we perhaps
use in our speech are not necessary in
our writing and it results in what I
like to call the Jackson Pollock effect
of commas where you might find yourself
just like taking a paintbrush and
splattering the commas all over the page
and it doesn't quite make sense where
they've gone or why they're there
so it's important to not overuse the
comma and make sure that if you use it
you really mean to use it and it's
serving a purpose in your sentence Oscar
Wilde said that he would spend the
morning putting in a comma and the
afternoon taking out a comma which I
think is a really great example about
how much you can and should think about
the comma but there are instances where
I would advocate for throwing in a comma
and the biggest reason to do it is if it
improves the clarity of your sentence
here's a really funny and somewhat
famous example it says let's eat grandma
now in this case there's no comma what
is the meaning of this sentence well it
would seem to indicate that we are
advocating for eating our grandmother
which of course we don't want to do so
here it's very vital to add this comma
right here let's eat
comma grandma in this scenario we're
talking to our grandma and we're saying
hey grandma it's time to eat
so punctuation it saves lives
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