Mark H. Teeter

Most educated Russians know or know of "1984," George Orwell's classic dystopian novel. Yet when asked, few of my Moscow friends (or yours, I'll wager) can recall just what Winston Smith, the novel's hero, did for a living after his "rehabilitation" at the hands of Big Brother's minions. Give up? He studied English punctuation:

 
"He had been appointed to a subcommittee of a subcommittee [...] engaged in producing something called an Interim Report ... [which had] something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside."

Poor Winston. But guess what: it's now a quarter-century since 1984, and the subcommittee is still meeting. Poor us.

Yes, questions about where commas should be placed continue to arise in post-Winstonian Eurasia, Eastasia, Oceania and everywhere else English is used. This includes Moscow, whose two English-language newspapers often place them differently - sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
 
But Russians learning English should not be discouraged. Professor Extreme is here to help. Think of me as the Big Brother of commas.
 
1. Two Minutes Hate for the Goldstein of punctuation
 
The evildoer who inflicted the comma on an unsuspecting world was a 15th-century Venetian printer known as Aldus Manutius the Elder, a pedantic yet design-happy geezer who went on to invent the semicolon; and to the disdain of the Moscow News website editors, he also invented the italic typeface.

To be fair, loathing for A.M. the E. is not universal. The placement of
commas in Russian is almost entirely predictable, and writers of German,
French or Italian couldn't imagine a subcommittee like Winston Smith's.
 
It's those writing English who have the big problems. Not only do rules for comma placement differ between the British and US variants, there have long been serious disagreements within the camps. Thus Winston's subcommittee was plagued, Orwell tells us, by "haggling," "quarrels" and even "threats"; and to this day "grown men have knock down fights over the comma," reports real-life "stickler" Lynne Truss in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" (2003), a witty bestseller about punctuation that includes a disheartening number of ... comma mistakes.
 
Indeed, things are so bad among Anglophones that the eminent grammarian Sir Ernest Gowers has gloomily postulated: "The use of commas cannot be learned by rule." Sigh. So what's a Russian student of English supposed to do - guess?
 
2.  Coming out of a comma

Relax. Thanks to the strictly-observed comma conventions in their own language, literate Russians seldom fail to insert them correspondingly when writing English - which usually works out fine. Granted, in some "mechanical" cases commas are used in English where they aren't in Russian, including: certain date renditions ("He was born June 13, 1984."); within large numbers (2,900,000); to introduce direct quotation ("He shouted, ‘Boo!'"); and in friendly letter salutations ("Dear Aunt Minnie,").
 
But basically, my students' difficulty with commas in English is far less where to put them than where notto. So listen up, kids: the best approach may be to learn to recognize three kinds of situations; your Russian models will make the lack of commas in them seem counterintuitive, but when your hand starts itching madly to comma-tize these constructions in English - don't.

(a) "A sober viewer quickly perceives that Beck is a dolt." / "He doesn't know what he's talking about." In English, dependent clauses starting with "that," "what," "if," "where," "when" and the like DON'T want commas before them. And please, please, please: don't assume that "because" needs a comma somewhere near it because "потому что" often does.
 
(b) "What the investigation revealed was embarrassing." /"How drunk Cheney was when he shot the old lawyer is still unclear." A subject clause, even a lengthy one, ordinarily doesn't take a comma after it - although its translation into Russian probably will.
 
(c) "Juanita hurriedly photocopied the illegal-firing memos which were marked ‘National Security' before Karl and Uncle Alberto returned." The "which" here (a "that" for some sticklers) starts a restrictive subordinate clause: not ALL the illegal-firing memos were copied, only those euphemistically marked. The point: sniffing a который clause somewhere under the English should not produce a Pavlovian comma reaction.
 
There, see how easy doing nothing is? Or put it this way: don't just do something - stand there!
 
3. The Extreme English Interim Comma Report:
 
If in doubt, leave it out. Or answer to the Ministry of Punctuation.
 
Extreme Extra Credit:Last time: The actor "unaccustomed to speaking" was Harpo Marx, of course. Today: in what American novel does the hero's roommate "[stick] all the commas in the wrong place" in his English compositions? 
 
Next time: Punctuate that!
 
Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator based in Moscow.
 
Pull-quote: Where not to comma-tize is the question