Day: November 15, 2015

Commas can be sneaky little beasts. They do far more than simply indicate a pause in a sentence, and a writer should never underestimate the importance of using them correctly. Misusing a comma can change the meaning of your sentence and, at the very least, make your otherwise fine writing look sloppy and unprofessional. Although a good editor will clean up a writer’s punctuation, I’ve often seen comma errors crop up in published books, blog posts and blurbs. Here are a few examples of common mistakes.

Restrictive Appositive

I see this error all the time in romance novel blurbs:

INCORRECT: Eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Grady Turner, knew it was wrong to fall in love with a patient.

An appositive is a group of words that identify or explain a noun or pronoun; the appositive is called restrictive if removing it changes the meaning of the sentence. In the example above, “Dr…