Comma chameleon

It's the small things that piss you off. From time to time, you get an author who is in love with their own understanding of the English language. This is dangerous for an editor, whose understanding of English is likely to be better (in my case, nigh on certain: this is my profession, after all -- I peddle my knowledge of English to make money). Most authors would accept that if you hire a plumber, you don't argue with them about the need for a new washer, and do not contest edits. If they do, when they are given reasoning, they concede the point. I think they are often impressed that there is reasoning. The authors who love their own use of English will contest edits though, and reasoning is something they are both short on and unwilling to understand.

So I'm editing a book on family trusts and the guy who's written it thinks he is a grammar whiz. He's written books on style too, although these are quasi self-published.

The guy makes many errors and varies from the house style in lots of places. I've been forewarned that he will cavil at changes that he doesn't like, so I am ready to defend my edits. Curiously, it doesn't ever occur to authors that if I make a change, I'm not going to agree without reason that I was wrong! I might miss something or fuck things up but I don't change things on a whim.

He contests the following sentence (ignore the clumsy, awful writing -- I'm not paid to make him write well, only to make him do so correctly):

"The term joint tenant refers to the ownership of an asset by two or
more people collectively in such a way that on the death of one, the ownership passes automatically to his or her
survivor or survivors."

This, he claims, needs two commas or none. He is wrong. He originally wrote it with two commas, one after "that" and the one that I have left. This is a common error; nonetheless it is an error.

We use two commas to parenthesise a phrase. We can only do that if the
parenthesised phrase is not necessary to the sense of the sentence.
There is no parenthesis here, because the second part of the sentence
relies on the phrase that you want to comma off: ownership only passes
in this way on the death of one. This is the crux of my disagreement with him. He simply doesn't understand that two commas are clearly wrong. Most
people feel uncomfortable with leading into this kind of clause
without one, but it's correct not to put one in.

For writers, I would give this advice: if you have a clause that is introduced by "that", do not use a comma unless the part you are enclosing in commas is a parenthesis. If the second half of the clause that is subordinated by "that" relies on the part in parenthesis for its sense, you have made a mistake. Unless you are Jane Austen.

Imagine you had a sentence "On the death of one, the ownership
passes automatically to his or her survivor or survivors". It should
be clear enough that you need a comma in this sentence. Generally, an
adverbial phrase that is topicalised by being placed first in a
sentence requires comma'ing off from the sentence. No comma would be
necessary were it last in the sentence. This is elementary. If you do not routinely comma off long adverbial phrases, either you write for newspapers a great deal or you were not paying attention in punctuation class at school.

Clauses ought to be punctuated in exactly the same way as sentences
that they resemble. This is because a clause is almost always a
sentence that has been conjoined with or subordinated to another. So
the comma I use should be there. (Using a comma after "that" would be as clearly wrong as using a comma to begin a sentence.)

The author would have been right to insist on two commas were the sentence
"such that, as you would expect, the ownership passes..." Here the
comma'd-off phrase is entirely parenthetical and the sense of the
sentence remains without it.

Just so that we're clear, here's the sentence without the phrase in question:

"The term joint tenant refers to the ownership of an asset by two or
more people collectively in such a way that the ownership passes automatically to his or her
survivor or survivors."

Not only does this not make any sense, it is no longer even grammatical. "His or her" cannot refer to "two or more people".

So did the author give me masterful reasoning for his version? Did he show that I was wrong? No, of course not. He just repeated that he didn't like the comma.

In some cases, how to punctuate a sentence is a matter of taste -- and
taste differs -- but this is not one of those cases in my view. It is entirely wrong to leave out the comma and even more wrong to use two.

In case you were wondering, if I had free rein, the guy would have written "'Joint tenants' own assets collectively. If one dies, ownership passes automatically to his or her survivor or survivors." All the author was doing in using his convoluted, ugly sentence was setting up a contrast with tenants-in-common, who also own assets collectively but do not pass on ownership in the same way.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:31 am