Commas 101: There are rules!

In my book, The 8 Fatal Mistakes Made by Self-Publishers, I briefly touch on punctuation, specifically, commas. I am very passionate about commas.
Many argue that comma use is subjective. It isn’t. Commas are NOT visual pauses. There are actual rules. Click To Tweet

Follow them and no one gets hurt. Or, at the very least, your sentence won’t look like disheveled copy thrown together by someone with no respect for the reader. As an editor, one of the most common things I have to hack and slash at are all those extra commas. Outside of blatant spelling errors and the misuse of apostrophes on pronouns (that will be another post), commas cost you, the writer, more time — which means more money — with an editor.

In this series, we’ll pull one rule at a time and play with it. The hope is that you’ll have a better understanding of the lovely, hard-working comma, and you’ll stop abusing it.