Read A Dash of Style for Free Online Page B

out, a problem; in the latter, you aim to deliberately craft something in a certain way. The benefits achieved will largely parallel each other, yet there are different reasons for doing so, and different approaches:
    •You might abstain from commas in order to speed up the pace, particularly in a section where the work lags. Comma-less writing is as fast as it gets. It accelerates the rhythm, and in some instances this is necessary.
    • There might be times when you want a sentence to be read as a single uninterrupted thought. In such a case, removing the comma creates the desired effect:

    I checked the filter, and changed the water, and hit the button three times, and the damned thing still wasn't working.
    I checked the filter and changed the water and hit the button three times and the damned thing still wasn't working.
    Both of these are acceptable, but they offer different effects. The latter reads as if spoken all in one breath, and the writer might want this effect to indicate the narrator's exasperation, his letting it all out at once. It is a stylistic decision.
    •The same holds true in dialogue, where the comma's impact is even more potent. You can, for example, omit commas in dialogue to indicate someone speaking all in one breath, or in a hurried manner. Consider:
    "Make a right on 57th and a left on 3rd and a right on 80th and step on it because I'm ten minutes late."
    This can also be used to indicate someone in the midst of a heated dialogue, who, for example, won't let the other person get a word in. Or it can be used to indicate a distracted person, or one who has no attention span and who rambles on uncensored.
    • Omitting commas can help achieve a stream-of-consciousness feeling.
    When one reads a long free-flowing sentence like this without any commas it gives the feeling of letting it all out uncensored which is exactly what the stream of consciousness writer is trying to achieve when crafting his work which he might consider a sort of calculated spontaneity.
    Pausing is synonymous with thinking and calculation, and thus it is not surprising that the hallmark of stream-of-consciousness writing is a dearth of commas.
    •You can omit commas in order to deliberately gloss over something important. Some writers like to make readers work, to not lay out everything; for them, the joy comes in forcing the reader to decipher their text. One way of doing this is to mention an important item merely as an afterthought, perhaps even sandwich it between unimportant items. Some writers aim to create sentences that, if you read late at night, you are likely to miss. They might drop bombshells this way and keep going; the story has changed and the reader does not know why, and needs to go back and reread. It is the understated approach, the antirevelation. And it can be facilitated by burying key information amid a comma-bereft sentence.
    Let's look at some examples from literature. In her story "Kew Gardens," Virginia Woolf deliberately omits commas when describing the "flower-bed":
    From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into the heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half-way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface. . . .
    This is stylized, and will be hard for most readers to digest; but Woolf must have felt that it furthered her intention, or else she would not have chosen to omit the commas. You might say that omitting the commas here allows the reader to take in the entire beauty of the flower bed in one breathless sweep.
    In one of her most famous poems, "Sonnet 43," Elizabeth Barrett Browning avoids commas to great effect:
    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
    Normally "depth and breadth and height" would be separated by commas; by ommitting them, Browning