I am always at a loss when it comes to, and.
When writing my column, my editor doesn't want the comma before the and. However it appears in fiction they are needed..
It used to be grammatically frowned upon to do so, at least here in New Zealand, but that doesn't seem to be the case now. Most of the time 'and' does not need a comma before or after it. Because we naturally pause at a comma (regardless of the rules of grammar that state we don't need to anymore), putting a comma before or after 'and' can cause an unnatural pause for the reader, as 'and' provides a little bit of break all on its own.
Occasionally 'and' needs a comma before or after it, but not often - at least not in my opinion, which isn't worth all that much.
Originally, it appears, the comma was devised to help people understand how much of a pause was needed between pieces of text when reading aloud. It was only later that grammatical rules were applied to it.
Personally (and this is only my opinion; i have no grammatical rules to back me up), i find sentences easier to read when commas are placed where pauses should be. I generally find this to be where the thought in a sentence changes somewhat (without 'and' or 'or' to break the thoughts up) or if items are being listed. That is probably because i tend to read everything aloud in an undertone (a mumble, in other words
) as i go along.
That example Sass mentioned from that other thread, which was a hoot by the way, was interesting for a couple of reasons:
I have been advised by my therapist, to take a moment, I did and I am still angry! I admit it, I like to argue. Stop, rewind, from the beginning.
That first horrible sentence would read much better if it were split in two, like thus:
I have been advised by my therapist to take a moment. I did and I am still angry. There could also be an argument for putting a comma after 'did' and before 'and', but i don't think you need to. The last sentence would read much better like:
Stop, rewind from the beginning. Even if commas were supposed to be there to mark pauses there isn't a pause after rewind anyway, at least not one long enough for a comma. You could make a case for a comma if you worded the sentence like this:
Stop and rewind, from the beginning. But now that i think about it, how does one rewind from the beginning? Okay, methinks i shall leave it there, lest i get completely sidetracked.
Grammatically speaking, if we were to examine the initial sentence we would find, as Sass highlighted with the other sentence, that it can't stand up without the clause marked as independent.
It would read:
I have been advised by my therapist I did and I am still angry. Of course, that makes no sense.
As usual, wikipedia is a useful reference for the grammatical rules we associate with commas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_(punctuation)
Most dictionaries, however, still have one of their definitions of comma as 'a slight pause in a sentence'.
Well, that was confusing
In short, commas are fun
, and can change the meaning of a sentence completely with hardly any effort.
Hopefully all that made some sense.
Iz
but I really do find it confusing, especially when I read something in one book written one way, and then another way somewhere esle.