Several months ago, a co-worker, out of the blue, asked me a serious question, “How many commas are allowed in an English sentence?”
He thought there was some hard limit of 3 or 4 commas. Of course, I then told him there was no limit and you could use as many commas as you wanted, but at some point it would probably be bad form and you should try to break it up into new sentences.
So accepting that there is no hard limit, what do you think is a practical upper limit for the amount of commas in an English sentence before you get exhausted and just can’t take any more?
I dunno, it seems like my English translation of Proust has sentences that go on for a page and a half and must have at least a dozen commas. I think a clever person doesn’t ever need to stop.
It depends entirely on the context, I’d think. If you’re writing a literary novel, and you’re good, you can go into the dozens. Given folks like Cormac McCarthy and his disdain for punctuation, you can probably pick up some surplus for real cheap, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see folks treat an otherwise-well-written monosentence novel with great delight.
If you’re writing a newspaper story, more than two or three commas is too many.
They had more tolerance for endless sentences in 18th century prose, gluing together any number of clauses with commas and semicolons before ever using a period. But back then English grammarians and writers had different concepts of sentence structure and punctuation, based on classical forms of rhetoric. Nowadays we aim at readability instead.
I don’t know about the practical upper limit for commas in the present day, but as for quotation marks, John Barth’s 1968 story “Menelaiad,” which is symmetrically built up of embedded quotes so that the second half of the story mirrors the first half, has at its center the definite world record number of embedded quotation marks: An entire line on the page is taken up with embedded quotation marks (alternating double and single), and at the center is nothing but a question mark.
What we might have here, of course, is a well-meant “rule” imposed by some teacher, suggesting to his students that whenever we have more than four commas in a particular sentence, as we do in this perfectly comprehensible sentence, the reader will tend to get confused following it, which does happen, but mostly it happens when the sentence is constructed poorly, has other grammatical confusions and missteps in it, or contains ideas which jump around rather than proceeding logically from the idea preceding them.
If, in fact, one has an aversion to commas, it might be worthwhile, all things considered, to stop and reflect whether, on balance, such an aversion is a good thing, a bad thing, or neutral, and, upon reflection, if the aversion is a bad thing, what can be done to combat it, or, if the aversion is neutral, whether any change is necessary, or even desirable.
There is no legal limit. Sometimes I think that’s really a shame. Try reading royal proclamations from the Elizabethan era sometime. I think their lawyers were paid by the comma.
