I just read through the comma section and about another 50 other pages of stuff. It really helped me brush up again with on my grammar rules. Thanks for the recommendation.
If you want to keep it with the exact wording you've already written, then I would take out all commas so it reads: He sighed as he watched Jake squirm hopelessly and then felt Mary tug him on his sleeve. It's not really a wonderful sentence, but it's much easier to understand this way. If I were you I would do as others have suggested above and break it up some other way, such as two separate sentences. I don't know this rule. I would have omitted the comma in all the examples you shared. An excellent book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss. It's a book all about proper punctuation usage, except that it's actually entertaining to read. The author is hilarious; definitely recommended.
And it's wrong on so many counts. If you must read it (it is fun, after all), read it in conjunction with David Crystal's "The Fight for English".
David Crystal... Now there's a blast from the not so distant past. My god, he lectured at Reading. The amount of his material I studied... The guy's a god. Nice to see his son's following in his footsteps...
ditto the post about truss' romp being okay for fun, but not being a good 'guide'... i use harry shaw's 'punctuate it right!'... there's a number of other good serious punctuation guides that serious writers should be using, instead of 'eats'...
I don't think I've ever come across advice on not mixing -ing participle and -ed, either. Cogito, any chance you can tell us where you get that advice from?
mercy... the original is 'keep it simple, stupid!'... but your translations are kinder... and just as useful... hugs, m
According to a grammer book I had to read for English Honors (I'll look up the name of it at a later date and time) you never, NEVER, put a comma before "and then". In fact, according to this book, you rule the word "and" out completely since it can be considered doing the commas job in a lot of cases. So from what I've learned your setence would neither be: He sighed, as he watched Jake squirm hopelessly, and then felt Mary tug him on his sleeve. He sighed, as he watched Jake squirm hopelessly and then felt Mary tug him on his sleeve. In fact it would actually be: He sighed, as he watched Jake squirm hopelessly, then felt Mary tug him on his sleeve. Also, a lot of editors are starting to have major beefs with the word "and" since it's widely overused in today's novels. Hope this helps ^^, I'll also try finding what book I had to read for english, its been a few years
Lewis Carroll: "The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down [...]" William Shakespeare: "But couch, ho! here he comes, to beguile two in a sleep, and then to return and forswear the lies he forges." Oscar Wilde: "'I am so sorry for you,' she said, 'but my brothers are going back to Eton to-morrow, and then, if you behave yourself, no one will annoy you.' Charles Dickens: "Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, 'Take me to her.'" E M Forster: "So she assumed a dazed expression when he spoke to her, and then said: 'A view? Oh, a view! How delightful a view is!'" 'You never, NEVER, put a comma before "and then"' is not a rule of English, and it never has been. It's a stylistic preference of the author of the book you had. Unfortunately, the sort of person who writes prescriptive grammar guides tends to be the sort of person with strong views about how the language should be (rather than how it actually is), and it should be their way. The better ones take care to distinguish well-established practice from their own preferences, but all too many do not. It's true that the comma or the "and" could be omitted with no loss of meaning, but meaning is not everything in creative writing -- the flow, the style, the individual voice and so on are all important too, and overzealous application of style guides tend to kill those. As a general rule, if a grammar guide says you can do something then it's almost certainly right. If it says you can't do something then it should usually be taken with a large pinch of salt (especially when it comes to grammar). That's a different matter. Something that's not generally a rule in English might well be a rule for a particular house style or editor (even if it's unwritten!), and you need to respect that.
none of those authors are currently writing for today's agents/publishers/readers... and what's 'acceptable' has a habit of changing, over time...
But it's still a style issue, not an issue of correctness. And to me, the examples are much more graceful than they would be if either the comma or the "and" were removed. Also, from _The Amber Spyglass_, Philip Pullman, copyright 2000, I see "He did as much as he could, and then he couldn't do any more." and "After a minute, he stood up gently and disengaged her arms, and then he turned and walked silently away into the dark." That's two examples in the five pages that I searched for examples, and this is a modern book. ChickenFreak
But that's my second point about pleasing your editor, and we agree there. As ChickenFreak points out, that doesn't make the construction incorrect. And the reason I went for older works is that I have them in electronic format because they're in the public domain, so I could search them easily. The five examples I gave were from the first five I opened. But if you want to be more up-to-date (and cover more than just fiction), try: Michael A. Burstein: "There was an awkward pause, and then Haas spoke up." Kim Waldén & Jean-Marc Nerson: "Far too many object-oriented methods rely on the unspoken assumption that the analysis and design notation will only be used in the early development phases, and then translated once into program code—object oriented or not." Robert Wilkinson: "Shoemaker’s procedure is analogous to that of Descartes: he states his position, and then, much as Descartes does in his Objections and Replies, considers the main objections which other philosophers have made to it." Again, the first three modern texts I opened. To get a more accurate feel for it, I tried analysing the BNC:OU written corpus -- a fairly modern corpus of about 3 million words, a million each from fiction, academic writing and journalism. It contains 870 instances of "and then", of which 227 had a preceding comma. That suggests that it's the minority form, but at over 25% it's hardly insignificant. If an author feels that in a particular instance ", and then" flows better than "and then" or ", then", I reckon they've got a strong case for justifying it.
in creative writing, as opposed to scholastic, it's a matter of what you can get away with... and each publisher has its own house rules, so you probably won't have the final say so... however, regardless of whether you'll be allowed to retain that pesky comma or not, no agent/editor who prefers to do without it is going to turn down your work for that reason alone...
Even in scholastic writing, that pesky comma (or that pesky 'and', take your pick) seems to come and go at whim. Sometimes there just isn't a rule. No, but lots of little niggles could add up. If you know of the house style, I reckon it's worth sticking to it.
certainly one must check the guidelines of all venues being queried and follow their rules 'n regs... but something as minor as that won't be specified...
Probably not (although it might be). But if the editor changed all the instances in the last thing you submitted then you do know now, whether it's written down or not
sure, but at that point, you'll have a contract and possibly even an advance already spent, so don't have to worry about it! ;-)
I've just noticed that somebody (I can't tell who) has given me a rep. point for this (thanks!) and asked whether I understood Bakhtin's concept of dialogality. Well, I got good marks on a college assignment on the subject: I spent a day researching in the British Library and came to the conclusion that Bakhtin himself didn't use his term "dialogality" consistently. This was the sort of move that either gets an "A" or an "F", because my tutor had told us that Bakhtin was held in such high esteem that nobody dared criticise him. But if anybody has been following my postings they will have realised that telling me I can't do something is almost as effective at making me do it as waving chocolate in front of my face. If anybody wants to discuss dialogality with me it's probably best to PM me because it's a bit esoteric for the general writing forums.
