A student recently turned in an exercise containing the following bit of inadequately punctuated dialogue:
"Why fuck guys, it's so cold my nipples are never gonna unharden."
It is a very different statement from the one she intended to make, which was this:
"Why, fuck, guys, it's so cold my nipples are never gonna unharden."
For that matter, you also get a different effect when you write "Why, fuck guys" or "Why fuck, guys."
A good many students arrive in my class already knowing how to use commas, which is what you hope for college students majoring in creative writing or English. For the ones who don't, I sometimes despair of persuading them that they must develop the ability to make what they
intend to write match what they
actually do write. But examples like this, which are funny and potentially embarrassing, help.
And I don't remember what part of speech the "guys" is there, but when you say someone's name, you need to offset it with a comma as well. There's a big difference between "I don't know Bored Dominatrix" and "I don't know, Bored Dominatrix," or "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma."
It's a constant struggle to convince some of them that this matters in the first place, or convince them that once they learn the rules, they need to proofread their work before they give it to me to read. I do what I can to explain the concepts, like I singing what I remember of the
Interjection song from
School House Rock to help them understand why "fuck" should be off-set by commas. I also have an extended analogy I came up with in which I compare typos to boogers--like commas, they're just
little things, those slimy bits of nose mucus, not nearly as offensive as turds! Nonetheless, you're supposed to keep your own out of other people's sight as much as possible. It's not OK to sneeze and let the contents of your nose go any and everywhere, and it's not OK to fail to proofread your work.