Read A Dash of Style for Free Online Page A

thus hide from heavy misuse. Yet the comma demands to be used—and used frequently— and this, together with the fact that it carries nebulous rules, makes it a prime target. And the main way writers misuse the comma is to overuse it.
    If there is anything worse than a work bereft of commas, it is one drowning in them. "Any one who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his conscience, as severely as we ought to do about disagreeable conduct in real life," said the Fowler brothers in The King's English in 1905. This might be a bit extreme, but their point is well taken.
    Overusing commas can create many problems:
    • When a sentence is laden with commas, it slows to a crawl, makes readers feel as if they're plowing through quicksand. For example:
    The florist, the one with the red hair, who had the only shop in town, right on my corner, was having a sale, at least a partial sale, of her trees, which were half dead, and overpriced to begin with.
    Readers don't want to have to stop several times to finish a single sentence. As a writer your foremost concern is keeping readers turning pages, and thus you must be keenly aware of when you're slowing the pace, and only do so for an excellent reason. This especially holds true if you're in a section of your work, like an action scene, where a fast pace is required.
    • A comma pauses, qualifies, or divides a thought, but if done too frequently, the original thought can become lost. For example:
    We can eat our ice cream, soft, vanilla ice cream, with extra sprinkles, with those cherries on top, with whipped cream and hot fudge, in the living room.
    The main point here was supposed to be that they could eat their ice cream in the living room. But with such a long aside, that point is all but lost. The commas, overused, distract to a fault.
    Some would say, in a manner of speaking, that, given the context of the Greek empire, and the context of world affairs, Alexander, in light of his time, was a great warrior.
    The comma can be overused when qualifying, as in the above example. When everything is qualified it creates a hesitant, uncon-fident feel to a work, as if the writer's afraid to say what he has to. Academics particularly fall prey to this. If we take out the qualifications (and the commas they demand), the point is more bold, succinct:
    Alexander was a great warrior.
    Now a stance is taken and whether it's right or wrong, readers will admire it. Readers want strong arguments and strong opinions; they don't like writers who play it safe. There is a benefit to entertaining one thought—particularly a complicated one—without interruption.
    • Sometimes commas are simply unnecessary. Some sentences work with a comma, but also work equally well without one. If so, it is always preferable to omit it. For example:
    He told me that, if I worked hard, he would give me Saturday off.
    He told me that if I worked hard he would give me Saturday off.
    Neither of these is "correct." It depends on your intent: if you really feel the need to emphasize the qualification of his working hard, then you need the commas. But if not, they can be removed. In writing, less is more, and you never want to slow the reader unless you have to.
    HOW TO UNDERUSE IT
    The comma is one of the only punctuation marks so widely used
    that its omission is a stylistic statement. Writers like Gertrude Stein and Cormac McCarthy are known for eschewing the comma, and books exist that never employed a single comma, notably Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which won the 2001 Booker Prize. Why would a writer opt to ignore the friendly comma? What would he gain from it?
    The reasons to underuse the comma are largely similar to the reasons not to overuse it. Yet there is a subtle difference between aiming not to overuse something and deliberately aiming to underuse it. In the former, you aim to avoid, or edit