{"id":3830,"date":"2011-07-20T09:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-20T03:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.indiauncut.com\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2019-05-13T10:13:51","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T04:43:51","slug":"slash-the-comma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indiauncut.com\/slash-the-comma\/","title":{"rendered":"Slash the Comma"},"content":{"rendered":"
Via Peter Griffin<\/a>, I came across this interesting article<\/a> on punctuation, and I take my hat off to Google Adwords. The article dealt, among other things, with unnecessary commas, and the ad just besides it, served up by Google, was a Make My Trip ad that advertised fares on three sectors as being Rs. ‘1,983’, ‘1,705’ and ‘3,271’ respectively. (Here’s a screenshot.<\/a>) One can argue about serial commas endlessly, but there seems no question that these commas are truly unnecessary—and ugly. Do these aesthetic considerations matter to you as well?<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Aside: After I wrote My Friend Sancho<\/i>, my editor and I spent an hour in argument about whether we need a comma when a character says “Yes sir.” I felt it would be an ugly intrusion and served no functional purpose; she felt it was required. I eventually gave in, saving my energy for bigger battles that never came. (She’s an extraordinarily good editor, and I mostly agreed with her.) But we laugh about that argument today, over such a trivial thing. I mean, what’s the big deal about a comma, right?<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n We will not discuss Thurber and Ross here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Via Peter Griffin, I came across this interesting article<\/a> on punctuation, and I take my hat off to Google Adwords. The article dealt, among other things, with unnecessary commas, and the ad just besides it, served up by Google, was a Make My Trip ad that advertised fares on three sectors as being Rs. ‘1,983’, ‘1,705’ and ‘3,271’ respectively. (Here’s a screenshot.<\/a>) One can argue about serial commas endlessly, but there seems no question, to my mind, that these commas are truly unnecessary—and ugly. Do these aesthetic considerations matter to you as well?<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Aside: After writing My Friend Sancho<\/i>, my editor and I spent an hour in argument about whether we need a comma when a character says “Yes sir.” I felt it would be an ugly intrusion and served no functional purpose; she felt it was required. I eventually gave in, saving my energy for bigger battles that never came. (She’s an extraordinarily good editor, and I mostly agreed with her.) But we laugh about that argument today, over such a trivial thing. I mean, what’s the big deal about a comma, right?<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n We will not discuss Thurber and Ross here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n