I really prefer tennis, though, and naturally
that got me thinking about commas. (Because when you're an English teacher, it
doesn't take much to make you start thinking about commas.)
I was thinking about the fact that tennis is
one of those "skill" games. It's not enough to be fast (I'm not), strong,
(I'm definitely not), or athletic. (Hahahahah! Really?!) Those are
enough to make you a somewhat decent handball or racquetball player, because
even if the other guy is better than you (and almost anyone would be better
than I), you might be able to simply out-athlete him. If you're in better shape
and if you're quick, you might find that you can slap the ball hard enough,
often enough, and quickly enough to eke out at least an occasional win. (Note:
This will not work against a truly good racquetball player, but at least
you'll probably avoid getting skunked. Maybe. You could always beg for mercy;
once you've done it once or twice, it gets easier. Trust me, I know.)
Tennis, on the other hand,
requires serious
practice before you can develop the basic skills you'll need just to keep the
ball in play, never mind trying to be competitive. That's why a "tennis
match" between two people who've never really learned the game quickly
becomes a game of "let's hit the ball over the fence and into other people's
courts and then chase it around until we get tired and then we can go have a
beer." (Although that also sounds like fun.)
![]() |
You may be cool, but you will never
be as cool as Bill Tilden (1893 – 1953).
(Image in the public domain.)
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The key to enjoyable tennis (read: tennis
that involves hitting the ball back and forth rather than over the fence and
into a parking lot) is groundstrokes. You need a strong, consistent
forehand and a solid backhand—those are the groundstrokes, and they’re the
foundation of respectable tennis. Then you need a decent serve, which is not
easy to develop. A strong, accurate overhand serve is made up of several moves,
each one joined together and practiced and practiced and practiced until the
whole thing becomes a seamless, smoothly choreographed ballet that ends with
the server up on the toes of his left shoe (unless he's left-handed, in which case
it'd be the toe of his right shoe) and a powerful downward stroke that imparts
both velocity and spin to the ball and sends it careening toward your opponent.
(A decent tennis player's serve could be as fast as 100 mph; some pros have
been known to hit 160 mph or more. At that speed I wouldn't even be able to see
the ball, but I might have a chance if I aimed my racket at the sound
it made.)
To your serve and groundstrokes, add some
agility and anticipation, and you have a skillset that will take a tennis player
a long way. Tack on a basic understanding of strategy and court geometry, and
you have what could be pretty decent tennis player—but one who will lose every
match.
Why will our hypothetical player lose every
match? Because, although she has some decent skills, she does not have an
understanding of the rules of the game. We've taught her to hit the
ball, but not when or where to hit it. She does not realize
that she must serve from behind the baseline and is not allowed to step across
that line until after the ball leaves the racket. (That would be a “foot
fault.”) She does not know that her serve must land in the opposite forecourt.
(To hit it elsewhere would be a “fault.”) She does not realize that the ball
can only bounce once before she hits it, nor that she can only hit it once (no “double-taps” or “double-touches”
allowed). She does not understand that when she hits the ball, it must land
within the confines of the court itself, in front of the baseline and within
the appropriate set of (doubles or singles) sidelines. She probably does not
know that if her (first or second) serve hits the net but still lands in
the appropriate forecourt, she gets to serve again, with no penalty. (That's a
"let serve.") She does not understand that to fault twice (unsurprisingly,
this is called a "double fault") is to lose the point. (Which
wouldn't much matter to her, given that she also does not know how to keep
score.)
I'm in no position to teach tennis, but I do
teach writing, generally basic composition courses, and mainly to new or
returning college students. (To those steeped in academe, that probably doesn't
sound terribly exciting, but I must say that I enjoy it a great deal; we can't
all teach Biblical Imagery in Proust or Victorian Prose & Poetry, and it's
a pleasure to see students who had previously been unsuccessful in English
courses discover that they actually can understand this stuff.)
You wouldn't think that someone could write an entertaining, educational, and occasionally even funny book about punctuation, but you would be wrong. The title comes from, of all things, a joke about a missing serial comma. Honestly, you should buy this book. |
I'm aware, of course, that the most important
thing in a paper, essay, or article is the analysis and presentation of (and
transition between) ideas and the synthesis of those ideas into something of
your own. If you have no ideas or no understanding of someone else's
ideas, there's no way in the world that you'll be able to craft a coherent,
cohesive essay. It does no good to drill students in the intricacies of commas
and semicolons if they are unable to articulate ideas—or if they simply have no ideas.
But I am after all old and curmudgeonly, so I
don't like to gloss over the rules of grammar and usage. I think they're
important. I'm not going to say to a student, "Oh, don't worry. It's OK that you have
no idea when to capitalize or where to place a comma or how to make a subject
agree with its predicate. After all, it's the ideas that are important."
Ideas are important, but as in tennis, so are those finicky little rules. It's just "custom," and customs do change, of course. But
we can communicate with one another only because
of those agreed-upon customs, and sometimes that stuff matters.
Take the serial comma, often called the
Oxford or Harvard comma. This is the comma that, in a list of three or more
items, precedes the coordinating conjunction used to connect those items. Consider
the following sentence: We ate tofu, broccoli, and sauerkraut at Larry's
house. (Remind me never to visit Larry at dinnertime. Remind me also to
decline any offers of a sleepover.) In that sentence, "and" is the
coordinating conjunction in the list, and the comma that precedes it is the
serial comma.
The serial comma is sometimes considered
optional, and indeed its absence often does not much matter; many sentences are
perfectly clear without it. But the absence of the serial comma can
occasionally lead to ambiguity, and recently that ambiguity cost a large Maine
dairy company millions of dollars when a court ruled that a state law was
itself ambiguous because such a comma was not present. The absence of
the comma, said the Court, rendered unclear the meaning of a Maine statute
relating to how overtime is calculated. In cases of ambiguity, the Court always
rules in favor of the worker over the company, and thus the workers' suit
prevailed, resulting in a $10 million payout to the dairy's 75 milk truck
drivers. (There's a very nice write-up of the decision and its grammatical and
legal ramifications in a recent issue of The New Yorker.) The absence of the
comma, and the ambiguity that resulted from that absence, earned each of those
drivers more than $133,000. That's a lot of money for a comma. For that much
money, I would expect several commas
and a semicolon, with perhaps an em dash or two thrown in for good measure.
So… As in tennis, also in writing. The rules do matter. Grammar, usage,
spelling, and the rest all count because they provide clarity. Regardless of the importance of your ideas, regardless
of the truth of your ideas, they will
have no impact if a reader
cannot make sense of the way you've presented them, simply because you've not
mastered the rules that frame that presentation.