Read A Dash of Style for Free Online

and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling
    out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.
    The abundant commas here reflect the narrator's experience as he's reading the piece, reflect his being shocked by the news, and needing multiple pauses to take it all in. John Cheever uses the comma for a different effect in his story "The Enormous Radio":
    Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.
    The commas here mimic the feeling of detailing items in a list. Except the grocery list here is their lives, which have been planned out too perfectly, too methodically. The commas subtly hint at this.
    In her story "What I Know," Victoria Lancelotta uses commas to complement the content:
    This is the sort of air that sticks, the kind you want to pull off you, away from your skin, or wipe away in great sluicing motions and back into the water where it surely belongs, because this is not the sort of air that anyone could breathe. You could die, drown, trying to breathe this.
    We almost feel as if we're suffocating, drowning in her commas, which is exactly the type of air she's trying to describe.
    In one of the great poems of the twentieth century, "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot opens with a comma-laden sentence:
    April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
    Eliot could have chosen to separate each of these images into several sentences, but instead he chose to keep them together, in one long sentence, connected by commas. By doing so, he forces us to take in the image of April in one long thought, and to fully realize how cruel it is.
    Perhaps because of this reason, because of its ability to connect several images in one thought, you'll find that the comma is often used in literature when introducing a character. Consider this example from Saul Bellow's "Leaving the Yellow House":
    You couldn't help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs.
    From Ella Leffland's "The Linden Tree":
    Giulio was a great putterer. You could always see him sweeping the front steps or polishing the doorknobs, stopping to gossip with the neighbors. He was a slight, pruny man of sixty-eight, perfectly bald, dressed in heavy trousers, a bright sports shirt with a necktie, and an old man's sweater-jacket, liver-colored and hanging straight to the knees.
    The commas here enable you take in all of the character traits at
    once, to absorb this person in one image, as you might do if meeting him in person. Notice also the varying of style here: both of these examples begin with short, comma-less sentences, and culminate in long, comma-laden sentences. Not only does this help to create contrast, to break up the rhythm and style, but it further demonstrates that the author's use of commas is deliberate.
    "It is a safe statement that a gathering of commas (except on certain lawful occasions, as in a list) is a suspicious circumstance."
    — H. W. and F. G. Fowler, The Kinq's English DANGER OF OVERUSE
    The necessity of the comma causes writers to misuse it more than any other punctuation mark. The period is luckier in this respect, since it is appears less frequently and is less open to interpretation; the colon, semicolon, and dash are also lucky, as they can easily absent themselves from most works, and