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Lindsey Durway wonders <<Does anyone here consider it an iron-clad rule that
introductory adverbial clauses be set off with commas?>>
Yes and no. Sentence adverbs (such as "however" at the start of a sentence)
can change dramatically in meaning without the comma. Compare "However, you
do this and that" (please note, you do this and that... I don't) with
"however you do this and that" (it doesn't matter how you do this and that).
<<I was taught (by my mom, no less) that the following is incorrect: "When
they looked it up in the book they found they were wrong." The corrected
version is here: "When they looked it up in the book, they found they were
wrong.">>
This is more often a matter of style than of absolute correctness, provided
that the meaning doesn't change (as above). The comma certainly makes it
clearer that the the introductory clause is parenthetical, and thus makes
the sentence easier to figure out, but the reader will eventually get the
correct message in the version without the comma.
<<the New Yorker consistently omits that comma, and it drives me bonkers>>
They've probably been afflicted by the dogma of open punctuation (popular in
the 1960s?), which basically tries to minimize the use of punctuation. This
approach was a reaction against the punctuation-heavy older styles of
writing, and was something of a breath of fresh air because of it, but some
people do carry it to extremes; when it becomes a knee-jerk edit that
ignores the reader's convenience, that's going too far.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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