#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.04.27 —Share a possibly unpopular opinion. 👀 (Be kind!)
When I received my first galleys and had a conference with a big publishing house editor—okay, I won't be shy because they were generally excellent: Ballantine Del Rey—I was literally told that commas (and other punctuation) exist to tell the reader where to breathe. They pointed out actual comma faults, but also had me remove a great many others. I could see how a carefully constructed sentence that progressively builds and reveals information could do so without commas and yet not lose meaning nor trip the reader into forgetting a predicate.
Like that one.
In retrospect, since the publishing house made money by reducing the number of pages necessary to tell the story, and by extension every single character could be considered valuable, I think the "style" sacrificed clarity and simple prose. Grammar exists for a reason, and there are plenty of more arbitrary rules than those for commas. That said, I'm not going to make comma usage involved with creating lists seem more important by referring to it by the elite college from which it takes its name. It is not better than any other comma.
My unpopular opinion is that by not using proper comma syntax, whether it is preventing "comma fatigue" (yes, that was the term) or saving characters during typesetting, even if you can intuit the meaning of the sentence, you risk creating ambiguity when the reader craves clarity. Yes, most readers won't notice, but what if you don't notice a mistake when you think out whether to use a comma as you write it? Not to increase your anxiety, but you risk losing a reader or appearing amateurish when you get such simple skills wrong.
[Author retains copyright (c)2026 R.S.]
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