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My younger sister is doing an English report on “the history of the comma”
Apparently, she has to do a 20 minute speech and write a report of x number of pages on the comma. She’s having a little trouble finding the amount of information that would fill up this much time and space on such an obscure topic.
Any ideas, info or links would be appreciated.
Sister MeatBeast gives her thanks. 
Google “history of the comma” for many interesting links, some of them even useful.
There’s a fairly new book out on punctuation, called “Eats Shoots and Leaves” (the title is based on the panda joke), which talks a lot about the comma. You might want to take a look at that.
Well, it’s about commas, isn’t it? She can just waste time by pausing a lot.
I mean, duh.
So far our googling has turned up a couple of interesting sites about a trinity argument in the bible, and one small reference to the words greek roots. Other than that it’s been mostly sites for book reviews and amazon links.
But we’ll keep trying.
Did you google for history of the comma or “history of the comma”?
It makes a difference.
Be sure to have her mention Victor Borge.
As Lynne Truss (the author) would no doubt be the first to point out, the book is actually called Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
Wait, wait, wait - a twenty minute speech? Yea Gods! I think the only time I’ve ever spoken on a subject for twenty minutes was analyzing a poem. In a college class. Twenty minutes on the comma? Poor kid . . .
Yeah…like I said, we’re having trouble finding enough information to fill the requirements, although we have found quite a bit now.
Thanks for the book, I’ll try to order it today from amazon if we can get it next day delivery. Then she can have an enchanted weekend full of reading about punctuation. shudder
This may not be what you need, but I’ll leave it up to you and her. It’s from an old [post=178760]post[/post] of mine.
The Years with Ross by James Thurber is an account of his years on the staff of the New Yorker. They once argued about commas in the phrase “red, white and blue”.
Thurber commented, “This magazine is in a commatose condition.”
However, as he admitted in the book, he only came up with this years later.