Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Commas, commas everywhere, and not a drop to think

Another article from the local campus paper caught my eye today. This one is about a local Habitat for Humanity project. My wife volunteers and serves on one of H4H's committees and I remember working together on this particular house, so this article about its completion was of particular interest to me. Hopefully the house itself was better inspected than the article, as the latter is littered with random commas.

The next Cleveland County Habitat for Humanity project, begins Aug. 15, and volunteers are always needed and welcome, Cox said.

There is absolutely no need for that first comma. In fact, it is distracting, as it separates the subject (albeit a somewhat long, complex one) from the verb.

Another sprinkling of commas in this article appears only in the print version. The caption on one of the photos states:

The Johnson family was forced to move into substandard housing when, Jojo, who suffers from Down Syndrome, was diagnosed with leukemia.

The so-called "corrected" version of this caption in the online version is itself fraught with comma errors:

Habitat for Humanity volunteers made it possible for Jojo, his father, Joseph Johson to move-in to their new home.

If you were to look at this sentence completely outside of context, there would be no way to tell who these people are or how they are related. Are they 3 separate people? Is JoJo the father, or is his father Joseph Johnson?

Put simply, the two individuals listed here should be separated by 'and,' not a comma, and the appellative needs to be set off by commas. Thus we need "JoJo and his father, Joseph Johnson, to move."

And then there's the use of "move-in" as some sort of compound verb instead of a noun! Why did the author feel a need to use a hyphen there? There is no reasonable explanation.

Sources
Print: "Sooners aid in new family home." The Oklahoma Daily. 28 July 2009, p. 1.

Online: http://oudaily.com/news/2009/jul/27/sooners-aid-new-family-home/

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