How Not to Use the Comma

As I’ve stated before, I don’t like giving advice on things I’m not good at. I have no idea how to use commas. My wife, who is my English Major editor, ridicules me for my comma usage.

I can’t tell you how to use commas, I’m no good at that. What I am good at is putting them in the wrong places. Here are my tips to guarantee you will misplace your commas.

1) If you haven’t used one in a bit, you’re due.
2) Put one in wherever you would breath.
3) Put them around clauses, and since I don’t know what clauses are either, just throw them in when it sounds like there might have been a clause.
4) Since I don’t know how to use semicolons or colons either, commas work fine there too.
5) You can use commas for parenthetical statements, but usually there I use parentheses marks (so you can remove a parenthesis and stick a comma in there too).
6) Stick commas before and after quotes and inside and outside of the quotation marks. One or two are bound to be right.

If you found this list to be highly annoying, relax, that’s why they invented editors. If you want to really learn about comma usage, try this place, over here, at this site.

How Not to get Published

Inept as I am at getting published, I feel bad giving people writing advice. Something not right about that. You should only give tips on how to do things you personally have experience doing.

That being said, here are my tips for making sure you never get published.

1) Write about stuff no one cares about in a way no one cares to read.
2) Include the phrase “I’ll make you famous” in your queries.
3) Rely on God to persuade editors to publish your work rather than your writing skills.
4) Spend your writing time going to writing conferences and reading writing books.
5) Write blogs about writing rather than writing.
6) Never finish editing.
7) Don’t write.

I guarantee, if you follow these tips closely, you will never ever be published.

Semicolons

Semicolons have been garnering attention lately. They were recently part of a very successful April Fool’s joke, spawning some debate over their necessity in the written word.

Here is a fine article about the history of the semicolon and it’s potential future. I actually like the semicolon. My wife, an English Major and my “editor,” has taught me how to use them and now I throw them around all the time.

Here’s my Inept Writer’s Rule for using semicolons:

When in doubt; semicolon it!