Steve writes:
Thank you for earlier reply on the placement of commas in my daughter's 4th grade English lesson. Her text book teaches to place a comma before "and" so so she shall.
My wife and I are still at odds over the additional use to two more commas.
I say the correct sentence should now be
"Collecting things, such as coins, cards, and butterflies, can be an enjoyable hobby".
The additional punctuation adds emphasis and aural spacing, which would seem to be in line with your previous answer.
I thought about raising this point in my answer, and then decided it would only complicate things. But you and your wife both have strong positions on this.
As you say, commas can "space" ideas and set a pace for the reader. Lots of commas will slow readers down, making them read more attentively. But too many commas can slow readers to a crawl.
In some cases, the presence or absence of commas can change the meaning of the whole sentence:
The dog who ate my homework lives next door.
The dog, who ate my homework, lives next door.
In the first version, we don't use commas because "who ate my homework" identifies a specific dog. Maybe we need to distinguish between that evil hound next door and our own loyal dog, who would never eat our homework.
In the second version, "who ate my homework" is a parenthetical expression, a bit of additional information. So we set it off with commas.
Similarly, we might take different meanings from the sentence you give. If we write
, such as coins, cards, and butterflies,
we're treating the phrase as a parenthetical interruption—throwing in some examples of "things."
But if we drop the commas, we're saying that only "things such as coins, cards, and butterflies" are worth collecting.
It's a very subtle distinction, but an important one.
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