I generally try to avoid linking to things that I find as unhelpful as this list; you surely don’t need my help finding shoddy advice on the Internet. But I went ahead and did so because I want to point to two key issues with this list. First, very little on this list is grammar (and the bits that are grammar are either wrong or dismally explained). This observation is more than just a quibble. The perception among students that their writing problems primarily involve grammar means that they often view their path to improvement as both narrow and fundamentally uninteresting. Not to say that grammar is actually uninteresting (obviously!) but rather that students might engage more readily with the task of improving their writing if they conceived of the task as having a broader intellectual basis. Improving your writing isn’t just fiddling with technicalities and arcane rules; it is a matter of thinking deeply about your ideas and your communicative intent. Calling it all grammar can be both dismissive and uninspiring.

The second—and more important—issue is the reasoning that underlies this list. A list like this says ‘all educated people should know these things, so avoid these errors lest you seem uneducated’. This edict misses an opportunity to talk about better reasons for avoiding certain usage patterns. For example, should you say ‘impactful’? It is meaningless to say that it isn’t a word: it is so obviously a word (if you aren’t sure, contrast it with ‘xsxsjwcrt’ and you’ll see the difference). But that doesn’t mean the world needs more instances of ‘impactful’. Use it at your own risk: most people find it icky and its presence in your writing may make them think unkind thoughts about you. Moreover, if something is having an impact on something else, you can likely convey that more effectively with a clear subject and a strong verb. Your writing will improve much more decisively if you disregard unnecessary discussions of legitimacy and instead think more about why certain usage patterns are so widely disliked.

After I had written this, I found a great roundup on this topic from Stan Carey. He discusses a range of these sorts of lists and provides his usual insightful response. He concludes with an excellent warning about grammar pet peeve lists: “Read them, if you must, with extreme caution, a policy of fact-checking, an awareness of what grammar isn’t, and a healthy disrespect for the authority they assume.”

Lastly, I really enjoyed the inaugural episode of the new language podcast from Slate, Lexicon Valley. The highly entertaining and wide-ranging conversation about dangling prepositions ends with an amusing discussion of Paul McCartney’s famous double preposition. A preposition at the end of a sentence is generally permissible, but it is probably best not to split the difference in this fashion: “But if this ever-changing world in which we live in/Makes you give in and cry/Say live and let die”.

I was so impressed by the sanity of this response. Rather than wishing nobody had ever seen her mistakes, she was glad that someone caught them. I wish I could adopt such a sanguine attitude about the possibility of error in my own writing. I have to keep reminding myself that errors aren’t ultimately what matters; reception and engagement are what matters. If we are read by lots of people, there is more chance that our words will have an impact and more chance that those people will come back to us with interesting and challenging reactions. And there is more chance that at least one smarty pants will come along and happily point out our mistakes. In this vein, I love reading the New York Times’ After Deadline blog in which an editor discusses all the stuff that got past their editorial staff. I’m always amazed by how much their editorial staff care about all this and by the fact that this impressive commitment in no way prevents them from missing all sorts of problems. I think devoting a blog to the acknowledgement, correction, and dissection of those errors is a great way to handle them. This sort of treatment shows that mistakes are inevitable, fixable, and often very interesting.

I was hoping that this post was going to be about the use of commas in restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, but that just didn’t happen. Maybe next week will be more conducive to thinking deeply about commas!

This post from the Lingua Franca blog addresses the nature of complexity and obscurity in academic prose. Lucy Ferriss mentions the University of Chicago sentence generator (which I discussed here) and then evaluates some of the pitfalls of academic writing. I particularly like her decision to direct attention away from jargon toward the prevalence of weak verbs. Jargon is an easy target: it can seem so gratuitous and so obstructive. But it is, in many cases, a red herring; jargon is often just doing its job and is thus not deserving of the amount of vitriol directed its way. (To be sure, I am talking specifically about academic writing and not bureaucratic or business writing; the use of jargon in those types of writing requires a very different analysis.) By deflecting concern away from the obvious suspect, Ferriss is able to turn her critical eye towards the verbs that are failing to animate the relationships between these bits of jargon (or ‘technical vocabulary’ as we say when we are trying to make nice). In Ferriss’s words, “we’ve lost sight of argument as action”. Solving this problem won’t be possible at the level of vocabulary choice; we will need to target the weakness that is often found at the heart of such sentences, the verb.

This post from the Hook and Eye blog deals with the length of writing assignments. The author makes a good case for asking students for shorter pieces of writing: that practice would allow instructors to pay closer attention and would increase the chances of giving feedback on multiple iterations of the same text. What if instructors assigned 3 pages to be submitted twice rather than 6 pages to be submitted only once? Obviously, there are unique skills involved in writing long texts, skills that all academic writers need to develop. And if short writing assignments were treated as insignificant precisely because they were short, that would undermine the value of this proposal. Overall, however, the close attention and multiple iterations might give students the chance to develop skills that they could later use in the pursuit of excellence in longer pieces of writing.

Break Writing is a collection of posts on academic writing from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University (they are called ‘break writing’ because they were sent at regular intervals over the recent winter break). These posts—all based around the importance of writing everyday—are full of helpful advice for academic productivity. Everyone needs different strategies and motivations, but I am sure there is something here for everyone. And the list of resources provides lots of places to look for more guidance.

Lastly, from the The Professor Is In blog, here is a good overview of a recent conference on non-tenure track faculty. The author provides her own take on the conference plus links to other reactions to this conference and the issue of contingent faculty more broadly. This topic falls outside the normal range of topics for this blog, except that academic writing can never be divorced from the professional circumstances under which academics write.

Every other week, this space is devoted to a discussion of things (articles, news items, or blog posts) that I have recently found interesting. I choose things that are connected—sometimes closely, sometimes only tangentially—to academic writing. Responding to other people’s ideas allows me to clarify my own thoughts and to draw your attention to other approaches to the issues central to this blog.

This innovative new technique, developed by Woljert, has altered the way this surgery is performed.

This innovative new technique, developed by Woljert has altered the way this surgery is performed.

This innovative new technique developed by Woljert, has altered the way this surgery is performed.

The first sentence clearly conveys its meaning to the reader: there is an innovative new technique that has altered the way some surgery is performed. The reader is also given supplementary information: this technique was developed by some researcher named Woljert. This element (‘developed by Woljert’) either takes two commas (as in the first sentence) or takes no commas (‘This innovative new technique developed by Woljert has altered the way this surgery is performed.’). A single comma here (as in both the second and third sentences) will throw off your readers because it doesn’t clarify the grammatical role of the adjacent information.

When clauses like this appear at the beginning or end of a sentence, the need for paired commas is obviated:

According to Chen, this new technique is very valuable.

This new technique is very valuable, according to Chen.

This new technique, according to Chen, is very valuable.

In each of the first two sentences, an additional comma becomes unnecessary because of the placement of the clause at the beginning or end of the sentence. In the third sentence, we see the need for two commas to clarify the role of this brief interruption. (Of course, you will have noticed that the first sentence sounds much better than the other two. You don’t generally want to give this sort of unimportant information such a prominent place at the end of the sentence. Similarly, you don’t generally want to interrupt a sentence in this fashion unless the interruption itself is significant.)

This use of one comma instead of two (or none) isn’t a particularly grammatically complex issue, but it is a frequent occurrence in the student writing I see. And while it isn’t fatal, it does make your reader’s life more difficult. In lots of cases, this mistake may just be random carelessness; it’s certainly easy to miss a comma here or there. But if you repeatedly use a single comma when two (or none) are needed, you  may be experiencing some confusion between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses: not knowing whether to use no commas (as you would for a restrictive clause) or two commas (as you would for a nonrestrictive clause), maybe you split the difference and use just one. Come back for the next comma post, in which I will try to sort out the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. As I will stress then, this distinction is most crucially an issue of punctuation, but I will also touch on the persistent dilemma experienced by writers trying to choose between ‘which’ and ‘that’.

Here is a discussion of the implications of the ebook format from Nicholas Carr writing in the Wall Street Journal. Carr’s interest is the potential for a lack of ‘typographical fixity’ (a phrase he borrows from Elizabeth Eisenstein) when a book is always up for revision. What are the proper boundaries of a book—what John Updike has called its ‘edges’—if there are no barriers to changing the text? In Carr’s words, we have shifted from ‘moveable type’ to ‘moveable text’. This shift may prompt us to ask ourselves a key question: if a book changes after you read it, have you still read it? For some readers, this question is bound to be perplexing and worthwhile; for others, it will sound like unnecessary hand wringing. Kent Anderson, writing in The Scholarly Kitchen blog, offers a critique of the hyperbole running through Carr’s piece. But I am still interested in what this ongoing malleability of text might mean for the psychological state of a writer. Carr’s article is called ‘Books That Are Never Done Being Written’. On the face of it, that’s not what most of us are looking for: an open-ended writing process in which revision never is, and can never be, complete!

As some of you will have seen, last week brought a flurry of activity under the #tweetyourthesis hashtag. I saw many beautiful but brief statements of research designed to be shared as widely as possible. I think brevity is a great thing in a context where length is the ultimate currency. (In the past, I have praised the Dissertation Haiku blog; its most recent entry is poignant as well as poetic.) Here is a discussion of how #tweetyourthesis came to be, and here is a somewhat critical response. Whenever someone says that good research cannot be summarized briefly, my heart always sinks a bit. Of course, good research cannot be completed without depth (and I would certainly concede that some scientific terminology may be truly incompatible with a limit of 140 characters ), but it seems terrible to say that you don’t have a good question if you can state it briefly.

Finally, Improbable Research identifies the best abstract ever. Go ahead and click the link—I guarantee you’ve got time to read it.

Every other week, this space is devoted to a discussion of things (articles, news items, or blog posts) that I have recently found interesting. I choose things that are connected—sometimes closely, sometimes only tangentially—to academic writing. Responding to other people’s ideas allows me to clarify my own thoughts and to draw your attention to other approaches to the issues central to this blog.

Today’s topic is the practice of putting commas in sentences as a response to the length of the sentence. Consider this example:

The purpose of these focus groups was to improve the understanding of the nature of risk and autonomy during outpatient treatment, and focus on exploring the role of the hospital and the professional team in identifying and balancing treatment efficacy and patient comfort.

The comma after ‘treatment’ is, as your grammar book will tell you, unnecessary. Indeed, putting a comma there might cause some readers to think that ‘focus on exploring’ is the start of an independent clause. To illustrate the redundancy of this comma, consider the same punctuation pattern in a very simple sentence:

I went to the store for milk, and eggs.

This sentence will look wrong to most of us since it separates ‘milk’ and ‘eggs’ when they are obviously meant to go together. There is no reason for a comma between ‘I went to the store for’ and ‘eggs’. We wouldn’t say ‘I went to the store for, eggs’. (We would, however, say, ‘I went to the store for milk, eggs, and avocados’ because we punctuate lists of three or more items differently than we do pairs. For more on lists, see here, here, and here.)

What, then, do we think about the comma usage in our first example? The grammar books suggest it is wrong. The analogy with a short sentence suggests that it is wrong. (Of course, I would certainly acknowledge that it is possible to refuse the logic that says ‘wrong in a short sentence, therefore wrong in a long sentence’. In fact, we do sometimes use punctuation differently in short and long sentences; Veni, vidi, vici invariably comes up in such discussions.) But whether it is wrong or not, this is a pattern of comma use that you will see in lots of respectable places.

My response to this uncertainty is to characterize this usage as non-standard rather than as wrong. This assessment alerts students to the fact that the usage may be ambiguous for some readers and may be out of place in some sentences. However, to me, the most salient thing about this type of comma use is that it is generally better to leave it in place than to remove it without further alteration of the sentence. Simply removing it may make your sentence more ‘correct’ but will likely also make it harder to read. Let’s look at our first example again, now with the non-standard comma removed:

The purpose of these focus groups was to improve the understanding of the nature of risk and autonomy during outpatient treatment and focus on exploring the role of the hospital and the professional team in identifying and balancing treatment efficacy and patient comfort.

You can immediately see that this isn’t a good solution. The new sentence is much harder to read and, in fact, some might even read ‘outpatient treatment and focus’ as a single phrase and thus become confused about the sentence structure. What are our options when a pattern of comma usage isn’t standard and yet removing the comma only makes things worse?

The simplest revision would look something like this:

The purpose of these focus groups was both to improve the understanding of the nature of risk and autonomy during outpatient treatment and to focus on exploring the role of the hospital and the professional team in identifying and balancing treatment efficacy and patient comfort.

Using ‘both’ serves to alert the reader that a pair is coming; since the reader is expecting the writer to offer a dual purpose, the reader will be anticipating a compound structure. The repetition of the ‘to’ (‘both to improve and to focus’) will be another hint to the reader as to how to read the sentence. Notice all the ‘ands’ in our example sentence; repeating an element like ‘to’ signals to the reader which ‘and’ is doing the heavy lifting.

Another option would be to restructure the sentence so that it explicitly anticipates the two purposes:

These focus groups had two main purposes: to improve the understanding of the nature of risk and autonomy during outpatient treatment and to focus on exploring the role of the hospital and the professional team in identifying and balancing treatment efficacy and patient comfort.

In this case, the reader encounters ‘to improve’ and then ‘to focus’ with a prior understanding that there are two purposes; by providing that explicit information, the writer makes very certain that the reader will know how to read the sentence. The only downside to this structure is the possibility that it could overemphasize something that might actually be trivial:

The trip to the store had two main purposes: milk and eggs.

But in our original example, the writer seems to be giving important information about the current research, suggesting that the extra emphasis provided by the colon is warranted.

In sum, I think it is valuable to be aware of this pattern of comma use as non-standard. With that knowledge, you may go on using the comma in this way or you may choose to rephrase. My point is that, in many cases, the optimal solution won’t be to remove this comma without also altering the sentence in other ways. In some cases, of course, simple removal will work, but in more cases, when we punctuate for length, we are responding to a valuable intuition that the sentence won’t work without some additional aid for the reader.

Our next comma post will look at the importance of understanding when a comma can stand alone and when it needs a partner.

It has been very gratifying to see how many people have added the blog to their blogrolls or otherwise shared my posts with their own followers. But in looking over a year’s worth of stats, I was most interested in one number: the number of times readers have left my blog to visit places I have recommended or linked to. I am delighted by the approximately 3,000 times that readers have gone elsewhere from my blog; the most frequent destinations are The Thesis Whisperer and Grammar Girl, both excellent choices. Since the Internet often has exactly what we need amidst thousands of things we really don’t need, I’m happy to be part of helping people to find the good bits.

I’m looking forward to another year of blogging. My plan is to carry on in the same vein: one week, a post on a topic in academic writing; the next, a post commenting on discussions of academic writing found in blogs and other online sources. This plan will carry on for some time, but I would love, at some point, to add a more general and responsive discussion of writing. In the classroom, I find it very helpful to give students some non-directed time with examples of academic writing. A class discussion of a particular issue will involve many related examples, all designed to allow students to apprehend the problem. However, unsurprisingly, this apprehension doesn’t end all difficulties with that issue. There is a subsequent—and much slower—step: developing the ability to diagnose writing issues without the prompt of knowing that the writing is being looked at with a particular issue in mind. I would love to add a new feature to the blog that might help to develop that ability: I could present a passage—one that hadn’t been selected to exemplify any particular issue—and then see how it might be improved in a range of ways, drawing on topics discussed in previous posts. Look for that feature once I’ve exhausted all the foundational topics I need to discuss and think about whether you have any troublesome passages of your own writing that you would like to share for online analysis and revision. And, as always, if you have questions or topics you would like to see me discuss, just let me know via Facebook or Twitter or via the blog’s contact or comment functions.

I had thought of including a laundry list of all the interesting things that have been written on academic writing over the twenty-eight days since my last post. But it’s too late, even for that. So I am just going to end with a link to a lovely post from Stan Carey writing at the Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The post is a plea for the gentle handling of mistakes, our own mistakes and those made by others. Carey blames our tendency towards judgment on the law of the hammer: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Many of the people who look at your writing habitually do so with a hammer at the ready. How can you be expected to write well—to use writing to express as clearly and vividly as possible your fascinating and hard-won insights—when you are afraid that someone will bop you on the head with a hammer? Your writing is far more than the sum of your mistakes. The success of your writing comes from something other than the avoidance of error.

When I talk about my work, people often feel a need to tell me how terrible it is that writers make mistakes, imagining that I will share their outrage. If this were a different sort of blog, I could list all the things in the world that I perceive as an outrage. The swapping of ‘your’ for ‘you’re’ wouldn’t even make the list. In fact, what could be more natural than that mistake? The two words do, after all, sound exactly the same! The eradication of error—and, of course, I see that as a worthy goal—is never going to happen and ‘not catching things’ isn’t at all the same as ‘not looking for them’. The capacity of the human mind to become distracted and miss mistakes that will be dreadfully obvious later is not something that I can explain. All I can do is admit to my own share of  horror stories and argue that editorial lapses, even  egregious ones, don’t warrant moral outrage.

So work against errors in your writing, large and small, but also do as Carey suggests and be kind to yourself. Better writing will come not from the fear of error but from the appreciation of the power of great prose.

Most of my links posts come from the range of links that I archive during my daily reading. But this one instead comes from something that came up in class and that was then reinforced by some comments in my Twitter feed. In my thesis writing course, we were recently talking about the perils of not writing ideas down when first they strike. In fact, I was stressing the importance of doing more than just jotting down an idea. In most cases, we need to elaborate on the idea so that it may be useful to us later; that is, we need to explain how that idea might play out or why it might ultimately matter or how it relates to our own work. It can be a pain to stop whatever else we are doing when inspiration strikes, but I have learned that finding an old idea without any elaboration is usually a baffling experience. It seems to be human nature to imagine that our future selves will have tremendous recall especially concerning matters that are clear to our current selves. Do you ever find these sort of cryptic notes in your files? ‘This connects to an earlier idea expressed by the second speaker in the fourth panel: it’s a dichotomy’. I made that up, obviously, but have a look at your own conference notes. Chances are, they are full of obscurity (this?), references requiring context (second speaker? fourth panel?) and words that fail to convey any enduring meaning (dichotomy?). It can be a painful experience to find one of these inexplicable notes. Imagine yourself triumphantly concluding ‘it’s a dichotomy!’ and obviously thinking that this was a valuable insight. And maybe it was, but now you’ll never know.

While I was reflecting on this issue, I saw a tweet from @RohanMaitzen that summed this phenomenon up nicely: “Now, if I could only remember why the word ‘superfluity’ seemed so important to my Eugenides review that I got out of bed to write it down.” She later tweeted that she had remembered the significance of superfluity, so her story has a happy ending. Shortly thereafter, I saw the following tweet from @thesiswhisperer: “I had 3 great ideas for my new workshop ‘If the CV is dead, what should I do?’ but was at gym and didn’t write it down. damn.” (I’m not sure how her story turned out, although I have every confidence that her CV workshop was great.) I even encountered a discussion of this phenomenon on Mad Men. In Season Three, there was an episode called ‘The Color Blue’ in which Paul woke up—hungover and still at the office—remembering that he had had a great idea for a campaign but with no memory of what it had been and, more significantly, with no written notes. Peggy encouraged him to tell Don the truth, and he reluctantly agreed, expecting a full measure of Draper scorn. But Don surprised him: he wasn’t scornful, he was sympathetic. The only explanation for this unexpected burst of human kindness is that even Don Draper understands that ideas get forgotten if they aren’t written down. The Chinese proverb that Paul quotes in despair is the perfect expression of this idea: ‘The faintest ink is better than the best memory.’

So, unless you have been granted a freakishly good memory, make it your basic assumption that you won’t remember later what seems obvious to you now. Write it all down with an eye to your future self: make sure that you note whatever you will need in order to work with this idea in a week or a month or however long it is likely to be before you’ll have a chance to return to this idea.

Finally, some related links. Here is a helpful blog post from The Thesis Whisperer with some guidance on how to use a notebook effectively during your graduate study. The ProfHacker blog recently addressed how to make notes on the go. If you are more likely to take notes on a computer or mobile device, here is an overview of Evernote, also from the ProfHacker blog. And if all else fails, maybe the post-it watch will help you when sudden inspiration strikes.

Some educators believe in using inductive methods in the classroom, and others maintain that a ‘top-down’ approach is more effective.

In this compound sentence, the comma separates the two independent clauses, indicating that we must read each one separately; the ‘and’ following a comma tells us that the next word (in this case, ‘others’) is the beginning of a new independent clause. The crucial issue here is the presence of a coordinating conjunction. A coordinating conjunction is strong enough to join two independent clauses with only a comma. There are seven coordinating conjunctions: and, but, so, or, nor, for, yet. Only those seven words can give us the compound-sentence-with-comma pattern found in the above example. I have listed them in a way that approximately reflects the frequency of their appearance in this capacity. Obviously, these are words with many other roles to play in our writing, but I am speaking here of their use as coordinating conjunctions. We use ‘and’ and ‘but’ all the time; we use ‘so’ and ‘or’ often; and we rarely (outside of literary writing) use ‘nor’, ‘for’, and ‘yet’. We can also write them in a different order so as to get a mnemonic: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. The resulting FANBOYS, despite being a somewhat silly word—I confess to having spent a fair amount of time rearranging those seven letters in an attempt to find a more dignified term—is a handy way to check if a sentence can be punctuated as a compound sentence.

Now that we understand this simple pattern of comma use in compound sentences, we can look at some related comma errors.

One such error is the comma splice: the placement of two independent clauses together with a comma and NO conjunction whatsoever. Here is an example:

The simulation of physical systems is a crucial part of scientific discovery, experience shows that conducting this simulation precisely and efficiently is essential.

This type of error—which is relatively rare—can be easily fixed in a number of ways, including the simple addition of ‘and’ before ‘experience’:

The simulation of physical systems is a crucial part of scientific discovery, and experience shows that conducting this simulation precisely and efficiently is essential.

What if we had attempted to correct this sentence by replacing the comma with an ‘and’? Note the ambiguity of a compound sentence without the comma:

The simulation of physical systems is a crucial part of scientific discovery and experience shows that conducting this simulation precisely and efficiently is essential.

Here it would be easy to read ‘scientific discovery and experience’ as a single phrase and thus miss the true structure of the sentence. Remembering that we always need a comma before a coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence will save us from this potential ambiguity.

Lastly, I would like to look at a related comma error that is very common: the practice of using commas to separate independent sentences joined by conjunctive adverbs (e.g., however, therefore, accordingly, finally, instead, nevertheless, specifically, thus) or transitional expressions (e.g., equally important, for example, in fact, on the contrary, on the other hand). Compare these two sentences:

Low levels of ROS are used in redox signalling reactions that are essential for cellular homeostasis, but high levels of ROS initiate an intracellular response that leads to oxidative stress.

Low levels of ROS are used in redox signalling reactions that are essential for cellular homeostasis, however high levels of ROS initiate an intracellular response that leads to oxidative stress.

The first sentence is correct, but the second one is not. Here is a corrected version of the second sentence:

Low levels of ROS are used in redox signalling reactions that are essential for cellular homeostasis; however, high levels of ROS initiate an intracellular response that leads to oxidative stress.*

In order to understand this distinction, we have to see the difference between ‘but’ and ‘however’. This distinction can seem opaque since the two terms have a similar meaning. However, we now know that ‘but’ is a coordinating conjunction, which means that it is strong enough to connect two independent clauses. Other words or phrases—such as conjunctive adverbs or transitional expressions—will fail at this particular task. Knowing that only coordinating conjunctions work in this sentence pattern and being able to remember the seven coordinating conjunctions (hence the value of the mnemonic, however lame) will allow you to avoid this particular type of comma error.

Let’s look at a final example of this type of error:

The design process of a UAV starts with a pre-specified mission agenda, consequently, following conventional design methods will lead to an airplane that is only suited to achieving the primary mission.

If you find that sort of sentence in your own writing, you can do one of three things:

1. Use a semicolon.

The design process of a UAV starts with a pre-specified mission agenda; consequently, following conventional design methods will lead to an airplane that is only suited to achieving the primary mission.

This is by far the easiest and most effective solution. The semicolon probably best reflects the close relationship that the original sentence was trying to create.

2. Use a coordinating conjunction to preserve the original sentence pattern.

The design process of a UAV starts with a pre-specified mission agenda, and following conventional design methods will lead to an airplane that is only suited to achieving the primary mission.

This solution is grammatically correct but may not retain the original meaning. In this case, for instance, replacing ‘consequently’ with ‘and’ is a clear alteration of the original meaning.

3. Use a period.

The design process of a UAV starts with a pre-specified mission agenda. Consequently, following conventional design methods will lead to an airplane that is only suited to achieving the primary mission.

This is probably the least effective solution. Although it is grammatically correct, it does not express the close relationship between the two parts of the sentence. In general, replacing these sort of commas with periods can lead to unnecessarily short sentences and thus choppiness.

In sum, understanding the proper use of coordinating conjunctions will allow you to construct correct compound sentences and will allow you to avoid problems with comma use preceding conjunctive adverbs and transitional expressions.

The next comma post will look at how commas are used as a way to cope with long sentences.

* Comma use after introductory elements will be discussed in a future post.