McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Comma Rule 6: Use commas to set off interrupters or interjections between sentences.
Keith Manderlin, a close friend of mine, went on the buttermilk fried chicken diet and lost 45 pounds.
I looked down at my thumb, a flat grape in the aftermath of me hitting it with a hammer, and realized I had better have my wife drive me to the emergency room.
Green tea, which is believed to be rich in anti-oxidants, varies in quality depending on your supplier.
I sat down and wrote a song on the piano, a lugubrious homage to my angst-ridden adolescent years, which became my all-time selling hit single.
Peanut butter, known to contain significant amounts of rat and cockroach parts, continues to be a brisk seller in spite of its reputation for containing impurities.
Commas and Other Punctuation for MLA Citations
The following needs commas:
When Zombies Became a Worldwide Pestilence, Circa 2012
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students I’d have to point to 2012. That was the year things started to go downhill. It was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans and people worldwide began to see the smartphone as a necessity more important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ an external amygdala with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long, until your brain dulled and short-circuited rendering you a mindless zombie falling down a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity as if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time. I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
Having a competitive edge has never been more urgent in this age of merciless economic stratification where everything is tiered including our educational caste system. I remind the class that 8000 students walk through the Humanities Building every week and of those students only 3% will pass our college’s Critical Thinking courses which puts my students in the 97 percentile. A staggering 90% of the remedial students won’t even make it to freshman composition.
It’s one thing to struggle at the bottom of the educational ladder with the odds set against you. But it’s a far worse thing to voluntarily keep a smartphone attached to you constantly because now you’re aiding and abetting in your own demise by allowing this insidious contraption to turn you into a dysfunctional zombie.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix in which we see we have a choice to take the Red Pill of knowledge or the Blue Pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The Blue Pill prophecy was fulfilled I tell my students in 2012 when everyone in the world believed erroneously they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters unemployed college dropouts who malnourished and corpse-like languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced anxiety and depression. Listening to my vitriolic rants against social media many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts. They all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone a dinosaur by today’s standards I have wasted tens of thousands of hours mindlessly relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded like millions of others into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on skimming news articles, consuming entertainment, and conducting product research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills I’ve remained a dilettante.
I too am in need of an intervention I confess to my students. I too am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's mind-numbing seductions I must now redeem myself before it's too late.
I make an announcement to my class. I am going to write a book about critical thinking as the antidote to the zombie state, which became a worldwide pestilence in 2012. The process must be reversed. The Red Pill must replace the Blue Pill. I will call my book Critical Thinking for the Zombie Apocalypse.
This sound like futility.
This sounds like a fool’s errand.
This sounds like the desperate play of a washed-up nonentity straining for relevance.
But my quest to save the students in my critical thinking class is like religion when you think about it. Religion tells you the world is a place of darkness and that to surrender to the world results in death—you navigate the Earth like a mindless zombie unaware that you slog across the planet in darkness.
I can shrug my shoulders and say the hell with it. Why fight the current? Why fight this tsunami of social media and smartphone addiction that is eviscerating our brains? Because complete surrender is nihilism the belief that nothing matters.
I cannot be a Priest of Despair and Hedonism.
I cannot tell my twin daughters now in the first grade that life is a meaningless joke.
If George Carlin is right that when you’re born you’re given a free front-row ticket to the freak show then you should know why it’s a freak show. And you should learn to tell the difference between a freak show and a non-freak show.
Knowing the difference means a lot to me.
But George Carlin was only half right.
The world is a freak show to be sure but only part of the world is. A freak show by definition means something deformed, grotesque, askew, out of whack. But these conditions are degraded versions of something better.
An informed opinion is a rare thing and it is a good thing to have.
An uninformed opinion one that is held out of habit and reflex more than anything else is a degraded version of the informed opinion. Mobs of people with uniformed opinions wreak hell and havoc on the world.
If they win then let the freak show begin.
Essay 4 Options for 150 points. Options. 1,400 words and is due no later than start of class on May 10
(Added a new option)
One. Based on Adam Gopnik's essay "The Caging of America," support, refute, or complicate the assertion that mass incarceration is "The New Jim Crow." You can refer to the Netflix documentary 13th, about the New Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery. Is there enough evidence to support the claim that mass incarceration is a continuation of Jim Crow and therefore is aptly called The New Jim Crow?
Two. Defend, refute, or complicate Conor Friedersdorf’s assertion in “A Social-Media Mistake Is No Reason to be Fired” that too often digital mobs pervert our ability to distinguish a social media mistake from a job-termination-worthy behavior.
Three. Develop an argumentative or cause and effect thesis of your choice that addresses one of the essays we’ve read on online shaming and digital mobs.
Four. Addressing Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s “The Unsafety Net,” develop an argumentative or cause and effect thesis of your choice about misogynistic trolls and social media.
Five. Support, defend, or complicate the assertion that the unstoppable presence of trolls on Twitter has made being on Twitter, for many, an exercise so embedded in futility that deleting one's Twitter account is probably the best option. Consult Lindy West's "I've Left Twitter," Joel Stein's "How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet," Kathy Sierra's "Why the Trolls Will Always Win," Andrew Marantz's and "The Shameful Trolling of Leslie Jones." And the following YouTube Video:
Six. Comparing “Faces in the Mirror” and “Markets and Morals,” develop an argumentative or cause and effect thesis about how the relationship between the commodification of everything, including celebrity, results in dehumanization.
Seven. In the context of “Our Baby, Her Womb,” support, defend, or complicate the argument that surrogate motherhood is a moral abomination.
Eight. In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Schedule to 5-10-17
4-19 Essay 3 Due. "Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik.
4-24 "The Flip Side of Internet Fame" (90) and "Evolution of Shaming." Also see "Social Media Mistake Is No Reason to be Fired."
4-26 Support, defend, or complicate the assertion that the unstoppable presence of trolls on Twitter has made being on Twitter, for many, an exercise so embedded in futility that deleting one's Twitter account is probably the best option. Consult Lindy West's "I've Left Twitter," Joel Stein's "How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet," Kathy Sierra's "Why the Trolls Will Always Win," Andrew Marantz's and "The Shameful Trolling of Leslie Jones." Also see "The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Woman."
5-1 "Faces in the Mirror" 31 and "Markets and Morals" 40
5-3 "Our Baby, Her Womb"418
5-8 "Unspeakable Conversations" 96
5-10 Essay 4 Due
Essay Options for Twitter:
Addressing Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s “The Unsafety Net,” develop an argumentative or cause and effect thesis of your choice about misogynistic trolls and social media.
Support, defend, or complicate the assertion that the unstoppable presence of trolls on Twitter has made being on Twitter, for many, an exercise so embedded in futility that deleting one's Twitter account is probably the best option. Consult Lindy West's "I've Left Twitter," Joel Stein's "How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet," Kathy Sierra's "Why the Trolls Will Always Win," Andrew Marantz's and "The Shameful Trolling of Leslie Jones." Also see "The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Woman."
Read the first half of Joel Stein's "How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet"
Sample Thesis and Supports for Going Off Twitter
While Twitter is a legitimate way to receive news from our favorite journalists and while I support maintaining a Twitter account with the caveat that we’re not being bombarded by trolls, I would agree with the argument that for those Twitter users who are in a collision course with the troll community, it would be better to delete their Twitter account for several reasons.
Some Reasons to Delete One's Twitter Account
For the undisciplined, Twitter can be, as Lindy West has noted, a bottomless “time suck” in which people start arguing endlessly back and forth just for the sport of arguing. This time suck becomes unpaid work.
Going on Twitter for “stress relief,” as Lindy West observes, can quickly become a reversal and afflict the user with even more stress than before.
Arguing with a troll becomes a waste of time and exercise in futility. In fact, trolls want to argue. Arguing back with them is their nourishment. We are “feeding” them, as Lindy West points out.
We can’t even report threats from trolls, Lindy West chronicles, without being called “censors” by the Twitter community.
Twitter cannot stop trolls who are creating pollution on the site. Lindy West has concluded that in a way Twitter is enabling trolls, so it’s best to bail from this toxic landscape altogether.
Twitter makes you more vulnerable to people who can be hateful toward your political views. In contrast, you can manage your Facebook page to create a cozy bubble in which you converse with like-minded souls.
Joel Stein makes excellent point that Twitter, and other social media, produce the online disinhibition effect: Without face-to-face interaction and hiding behind anonymity, people who are normally cowards feel emboldened to unleash their inner demons of hate, rage, and obnoxious bullying so that online discourse becomes a toxic environment stripped of ethical mores and civil decorum.
Trolls and others can engage in “doxxing,” the act of stealing people’s personal data and publishing it.
Joel Stein observes that trolls are not just losers on the fringe; they are mainstream people who, frustrated, and shackled by Internet addiction, including the need for attention, develop into trolls.
Reminder: You need at least one counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Joel Stein's essay: 250 words.
Paragraph 2. Write your argumentative thesis about deleting Twitter or not. 150 words: 400 subtotal.
Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs at 150 words each for 600 words and 1,000 words subtotal.
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs at 200 words each for 1,400 words.
Conclusion of 100 words for 1,500 total.
Other Option:
Addressing Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s “The Unsafety Net,” develop an argumentative or cause and effect thesis of your choice about misogynistic trolls and social media.
Sample Thesis:
There is no legal or cultural protection for the colossal swatch of trolls who hate women. Lacking meaning and conscience, this mass of misogynists hate women as a sick sport that diverts them from their narcissistic emptiness, abysmally low self-esteem, and pathological stagnation. Because there are no safeguards to protect women from these obscene fiends, women are better off staying off the Internet and promoting their voice through avatars, pseudonyms, and other forms of trickery.
Causes of Misogyny in Age of Internet Trolls
One. Men fear they're losing control in age where 1 in 5 men are unemployed and women are succeeding more in college.
Two. Men fear they're losing power for reasons stated above and they have a history of sexist entitlement, which is being threatened.
Three. Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex (and interviewed on Fresh Air), observes that misogyny, that is disrespect of women, has been worsened in Internet age where women are objectified in porn and encouraged to "look hot." These sexualized images of women become valued by men, not women themselves, and this connects men to images but not human beings. Disconnected from human beings, men feel no empathy for women, and this leads to misanthropy.
Four. Jezebel gives 4 more reasons, we should read.
Sample Outline for "The Unsafety Net" and Misogyny
Paragraph One: Summarize "The Unsafety Net" in 300 words.
Paragraph Two: Develop a cause and effect thesis that analyzes misogyny. 150 words.
Paragraphs Three-Seven: Supporting paragraphs (causes of misogyny in the Internet Age) 150 x 5. 750 and 1,200
Paragraph Eight, Conclusion: 200 words, 1,400 total.
List of Transition Words and Their Functions
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for successful marriage, glom on to the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that they as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break-up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and woman alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's passivity and his aversion to argument insure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a trouble maker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sports writer Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
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