They Follow Rules That Do Not Exist

I just had someone ask me about whether or not they needed a particular comma in a particular sentence. I asked why they thought it shouldn't be there.

"Because that's too many commas."

How many is too many?

"Um..."

I hear versions of that all the time. They either have to do with commas, as in this example, or with the length of sentences. Students tell me that their sentence is wrong because it is too long or too short.

Sometimes when they say it's too long, I bust out a sentence written by Virginia Woolf in an essay called "On Being Ill" that appears in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. It's 181 words long and takes up most of the printed page in the book. They are shocked to learn that such things are possible.

I'm not sure where people pick up such rules. I suppose a teacher in some class told them a sentence was too long, but didn't define the measurements for a proper sentence. Thus, they were left with a vague notion that sentences could be too long, but that the border between proper and too long was a thing undetectable except by experts.

When they say a sentence is too short, there is usually an undertone of Short Sentence = Unintelligent Writer. They don't want to present a two-, three-, or four-word sentence to their teacher, and they usually seem a bit embarrassed to even let a tutor know that they were only able to come up with those few words.

The saddest thing about those moments is that the short sentences usually serve the purpose of a short sentence. Students just don't know there is such a purpose. They don't know the value of rhythm, of mixing up long, medium, and short sentences for legibility and effect. They don't know that choosing, at times, to write a short, pointed sentence shows intelligence. They just know that it's shorter than their other sentences and they think there is something sad about that.

Too long. Too short. Too many commas*. I don't know where these arbitrary rules come from. It's strange because they aren't definable and aren't teachable like their real counterparts--subjects + verbs = clauses of different sorts, connecting clauses and phrases, listing, separating, connecting again.

*Oh, and also: Place a comma wherever you take a breath. This notion of a rule might work for speakers of proper English, but it proves disastrous for those who do not already know the rhythms of the language. Commas pop up it the strangest places because the reader paused ever so slightly to breathe.