Your first post in this thread makes a lot more sense now that I understand how you feel, Dawnstorm. My preference is for more formality in punctuation; agreed upon conventions, common understanding, and a lack of ambiguity. I can respect your opposing view but I do not share it.
If you examine my personality and aims it is easy to understand why I feel the way I do.
Thank you for your detailed reply. I was worried I might come across as if I were trying to invalidate your response, which I most definitely don't want to do. There's a lot of interesting stuff to discuss in this post of yours, and if you're interested to continue this conversation, we might take it to the theory board (I'll make a thread linking here, if you're interested; or I might revive the there-are-no-rules thread that already exists). Here, I'm going to focus on the more concrete stuff, about commas. I hope you don't mind.
May I ask: What makes it acceptable to invent new meanings for grammar? How are such things communicated? Perhaps this is not something I can understand. I have found that learning more about grammar has allowed me to ready more easily for instance.
That's the thing, though. People who would write things in fiction like, say,
Then he checked my chest, to make sure no ribs are out of place.
aren't inventing new meanings for grammar. First, punctuation - strictly speaking - isn't part of grammar. It's a field of its own, like spelling. There's a school of thinking that links punctuation to syntax (which is the one you find attractive); but there's also a school of thinking that links punctuation to rhetorics, which is where the equally common comma-is-pause-in-speech rule of thumb comes from. These people argue that punctuation should give hints how to read a text, and that there's a difference in emphasis between:
You should do that, often.
and
You should do that often.
The second sentence is one piece of advice about frequency. The first, though, is two pieces of advice: (1) You should do that, and (2) You should that often. But people don't generally repeat words if they still linger in the backbrain, so instead of:
You should do that, and you should do that often.
you get:
You should do that, often.
It's the same effect that lets people reply to questions with incomplete sentences:
Q: Where is the monkey?
A: In the tree.
This is way more common than:
Q: Where is the monkey?
A: The monkey is in the tree.
Yet, the first type of usage has been used as indication of "imprecise thinking". (I can try to hunt down an example if you like.) That's nonsense. As soon as you realise that "In the tree," is the answer to "Where is the monkey?" there's no need to repeat the entire sentence.
Grammarians suffer from the ailment a lot. It's, for example, where the rule comes from that you shouldn't start a sentence with a conjuntion. They argue that a conjunction connects clauses, and view this as an axiomatic truth. But while conjunctions can function this way, and probably most of them do, they can also function as discourse connectives (as in this very sentence, see?). Grammar can't deal with this, because - traditionally - the unit of syntactic analysis is the sentence.
This is short sighted.
Often, the rule-breakers problem disappears when you look at it from the point of view of a reader, rather than from the point of view of a grammarian. Analysis has its own pitfalls. Something that makes sense to you may help you - as a tool - to understand what's going on. But analysis only really triggers - in the process of, say, recreational reading - when something seems off. Then, people often refer to an inventory of rules, and if something does not fit the analysis that's identified as the "culprit". This works very well for spelling: "there" is not "their" is not "they're". But grammar is a lot more complex; you cannot boil it down to simple inventories of rules.
For grammar threads, like this one, analysis is the default mode of thinking, though. That's what makes sentences so hard to judge. You have to imagine context - or you stay firmly put in analysis mode. The result of staying in analysis mode, though, is that you do not have enough information to judge anything but the syntax.
There are plenty of grammar theories, some more inclusive than others, some (like systemic-functional grammar) even blurring the borders between grammar and pragmatics (the study of what uses grammatical forms are put to).
So, when you ask:
Also do you think that these authors made a conscious chose of style in these cases?
I have to say, probably not. Most of them just make a stylistic choice at the outset (say, "chatty") and then that's that. The commas go where they feel right. The thing, though, is: removing these commas afterwards may change the style and hurt the integrity of the text. It depends.
On the other hand, such a comma could well be the result of a misunderstood rule. Ugawa's second post ("Dang. I...") suggests that this is the case in this thread, so Fennel Giraffe's post was spot on, really. Me being myself, though, I took exception to the phrase "It isn't even optional". Not syntactically, no, but...
I tend to complicate things all the time, when I feel they're unduly simplified - even when it's not very helpful.
I would assert (rightly or wrongly) that most rule violations are not the result of style but a lack of writer knowledge. Perhaps giving them that knowledge would affect there style for better.
True, this is often the case. But let's say you're operating under a mistaken rule and put a comma before every to-clause. Then someone points out the rule is mistaken. You then replace the rule with one that reads "never place a comma before a to-clause". Your texts will likely be better from then on, because there will likely be less situations where a left-out comma before "to" will hurt the writing than the other way round.
But all you've done is amended a list. It doesn't help you understand writing at all. Taken literally, Fennel Giraffe's "it's not even an option," is either flat out wrong, too narrow in scope, or a matter of taste.
Perhaps you don't even believe style can be judged.
Style can be judged; but you need to specify against what you're judging the style. I'd raise an eyebrow in suprise at a query that contained such a comma - although I wouldn't mind. (Since I'm not an editor, whether I raise my eyebrows at queries is quite irrelevant, though.)
But you accept there are rules of grammar, right? If the rules are simply there to be broken -- if we randomly chose between commas and periods both would cease to have any distinction,
Yes, I accept that there are rules; but there's not a single list of rules that you can judge against.
There are psychological regularities of production. Native speakers of English will always parse "Tom ate the tomato," as Tom eating. "The tomato ate Tom," is a rather odd way of putting the same circumstance. Native speakers of English who wish to emphasise the object need to resort roundabout constructions, such as "It was the tomato that Tom ate." (German, for example, allows "The tomato ate Tom," because German inflects nouns according to case.) However, there
is one exception I can think of to the general syntactic rule: " 'The tomato,' said Tom." These have the structure of "object - verb - subject".
Then, there's social appropriateness. This is often a top-down thing. The more formal the context, the more likely you are expected to talk like the elite (while, in fiction, the elite sometimes tries to talk like the "common man", or the "common man" gets "elite status").
Then, there's a set of social grouping mechanisms, also predictable, that lead to certain rules. People who like each other and interact a lot tend to pick up each other's habits. This muddies the waters further, and may lead to conflicting rules. ("Never start a sentence with 'but', use 'however' instead," vs. "Never start a sentence with 'however', use 'but' instead".) Often, there's no sane way to choose one over the other without taking sides. The generous - and my favoured - stand is to accept variation.
Language changes.
The thing is that people don't place commas randomly. Even mistakes can be systematised. And some of them turn out to be another set of rules, rivalling yours but no less rational once you understand them.
The one time when comma usage becomes truly random, I suspect, is while you're worrying about correctness. Anxiety takes the place of intuition, and all bets are off.
***
Incidentally, In the book I'm reading right now - Sebastian Faulks,
Engleby - I only had to read six pages until I came across this:
Faulks said:
Mrs. Thatcher doesn't like Ken's policies, but he keeps getting elected, so she's had to close down the whole GLC. It was the only thing she could do. Short of having him rubbed out, I suppose.[my bolding]
It's not quite the same thing, but it's still the after-thought effect I was trying to show. It's exceedingly common.
For the chest-checking imagine the following situation.
Annie: Then he checked my chest.
Kelly: *giggles*
Annie: *glares* To make sure no ribs are out of place.
If Annie hangs out with Kelly a lot, "Then he checked my chest, to make sure no ribs are out of place." might become second nature. It will have progressed through: "Then he checked my chest. To make sure..." In between the "." and the "T..." there may have telltale signs of giggling from Kelly...
