Apparently, I love them. To death.
A comma is a printer's mark, designed to give clarity to a reader of printed text. It arose after the advent of the printing press, when it became clear that without some form of punctuation (like the period) readers could and would misconstrue sentences or worse, the meanings of entire texts, generally political or theological treatises, but I won't go too in depth into punctuation history here. They also helped printers increase the price they charged for printing. A comma used more ink.
Nevertheless, I love them, and I put them EVERYWHERE. I subscribe to the "read it out loud and put the comma where you naturally need to place emphasis or take a breath," approach, like an actor in the theater, I imagine. Which isn't wrong, per se, but it makes for an awfully dense page.
Astonishingly, Grammarly and Word think my comma placements are just fine. But they're like weeds -- they pop up pregnant with seeds, ready to sow the next one immediately, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
So....I'm cutting them out -- not all of them, just, many, many, many -- and humming the ultimate comma elegy as I do it.
