A Brief History of the Comma

A Brief History of the Comma

“Put a comma in whenever you take a breath.”

Almost everyone has heard that particular comma rule, or some variation of it, and that is unfortunate because the rule is unreliable.. But the rule does make sense in a historical context.

In antiquity,  before the arrival of alphabets, ancient texts could not be written out—they were memorized and were read aloud by orators. So the rule that you “put a comma in whenever you take a breath” can be traced back to the earliest days of reading and writing. Once texts could be converted into written symbols, they were usually copied down letter for letter—with no punctuation, capitalization or even spacing between words.

The Greeks wrote their texts so that their letters ran together withnospacesorpunctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began.

In the 3rd Century BCE, a Greek librarian named Aristophanes had had enough. Aristophanes’ breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. 

His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practiced reader would habitually insert between units of speech. This was not quite punctuation as we know it – Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries – but the seed had been planted.

Organized religion, specifically Christianity, played an early role in the development of more formal rules for the use of punctuation. St. Augustine was aghast at the idea that Bible passages might be read incorrectly, and he argued that the placement of punctuation must be in accordance with Church doctrine.

But it was not until the invention of the printing press that punctuation marks became regularized both in their appearance and in their usage. (Modern students, as much as they might labor to learn the proper use of the comma, can take some comfort in knowing that many punctuation marks have simply disappeared and therefore need not be studied.)

Gradually over time, a new view of punctuation emerged as the culture shifted from an oral one to a written one, and as silent reading became more common than oral declamation. Today there are specific rules for using commas in written texts.

These rules are not based on how a text might be read—either silently or out loud—but rather they are used to divide sentences into smaller units so that they can be understood more quickly and more precisely. The key to applying these rules is to recognize the structural elements of a sentence and how they are joined or separated by commas.

As you can see, the concept of the comma has changed over time and will, no doubt, continue to change. But the long-term trend has been toward greater regularization in developing and applying the rules as well as toward a reduction in the comma's frequency of use. Still the comma remains the most frequently used punctuation mark—and undoubtedly the most frequently misused.