There's no love for the commas.

Once upon a decade, they were plentiful. Commas were everywhere. 

As a young girl in public school, we were taught to stick commas in certain places. Almost twenty years later, I follow these same rules whenever I write. I put a comma before "and" in a list. I always stick one on the business side of "too" and "also." I would place one after "so" if it was at the beginning of a sentence.

When I started writing as a profession, I'd be very careful about grammar and punctuation. I prided myself on editors returning my scripts and copy sheets with "no changes needed" scrawled at the top. (It was like being back in school getting As!) But one day, one dark and dreary day, I got a paper back. Half of my commas had been struck through.

"But that's proper!" I'd exclaim. "That what I was taught in school."

"Rules change," I was told.

My commas, my beautiful, pause-inducing, thought-sorting commas were unloved by others. Cast off. Deemed useless, unloved, and dead. See this last sentence? That last comma apparently isn't proper anymore.

But it sits so perfectly before that conjunction.

"Deemed useless, unloved and dead" just doesn't do it. That final comma forces a pause which makes the sentence so much more powerful.

Poor commas. It's like they're becoming extinct. They're being phased out of literary existence.

I say save the commas! They're necessary! We need more commas in our print!

There are some people who use too many commas. This used to bother the crap out of me. Not that I'm perfect or anything. English is a pretty awkward language to write with all of the rules that aren't in stone, etc. But commas show pause. They give the reader a bit of a break. And they can help sort out ideas and thoughts and they just help okay so deal with it.

Who's making these decisions to change punctuation rules, anyway? Tell me who you are! I have a bone to pick with you, jerk. Why are you picking on the comma? Pick on a punctuation mark your own size. Like the exclamation point. Or the ampersand. Or the asterisk! Just leave the comma alone. It did nothing to you.

And with that, I'm going to go forth into the world with my arsenal of commas. We've got some invading to do.

Come on, boys.

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