Day 144: Move explanatory phrases to reduce comma use.
Every comma creates a momentary pause. When you have many commas in a sentence, you create many pauses, and the sentence will seem awkward and unpleasant to read. Consider this correctly punctuated sentence.
“The book, which is red, slipped, as if it were a bar of wet soap, from my fingers.”
The two phrases that make this sentence seem awkward are “which is red” and “as if it were a bar of wet soap.” We can move these two phrases to reduce the number of commas in the sentence. Now we have the following sentence.
“The red book slipped from my fingers as if it were a bar of wet soap.”
Here’s the point: If you need commas to include a descriptive phrase in a sentence, consider whether or not you can move the descriptive phrase and reduce the number of commas. If you can, you probably should.
