The Best Comma Advice We Can Give You

The best advice on where a comma fits is to read the sentence to yourself. If you come to a spot where you have to pause, then a comma is usually needed. I know this isn't the greatest lesson to teach somebody, but it does in fact work.

For the following, read the sentence to yourself and ask where the comma would go.

After the game we went out to dinner.

After reading the following, we can easily see that the comma would go after "game" because of the prepositional phrase "After the game".

After the game, we went out to dinner.

This doesn't always work, but it's a good trick if you don't have a clue what to do. Here are some other examples:

No there's no way I'm going to pay for a ticket to the Superbowl!

Bimpy ate the pudding cookie cake and ice cream for dinner.

The first one sounds like a run-on sentence without the comma which belongs after the "no". The latter doesn't distinguish whether pudding, cookie, and cake as 3 separate items. There is actually a food called 'cookie cake' and there might be a pudding flavor of it too!

Once you figure out a certain area doesn't sound right you can look for some of the rules of comma grammar that you know and fix the mistakes. In the first example you can tell that "no" is part of an interjectory phrase. The second sentence obviously needs commas after "pudding" and "cookie".

"Common sense"--and logic--are pretty useful! But then again, common sense isn't common unless lots of people have it!