It's time again for our segment on Punctuation and Professionalism. In our last segment, we learned about the comma splice, and how when you have essentially two complete sentences, or if you want to use the technical term, when you have two independent clauses, a comma is generally not strong enough on its own to link them together. Which is why when the civil rights expert Michelle Alexander writes in, The New Jim Crow, "We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it," she doesn't use a comma, she uses something much stronger: a semicolon. Or when the Steak House, Ruth's Chris, proclaims in its advertising materials, "Quality is not a fad. It's our signature," it also doesn't use a comma. It uses a period. There are exceptions, of course, as we learned. The luxury watch company, Rolex, for example, decided to stick with the comma splice in an ad campaign featuring iconic figures such as Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Sophia Loren, and Martin Luther King. "It doesn't just tell time,"" the ad boasted, "It tells history." But I want us to be careful about taking this kind of chance, especially with audiences that may be particularly strict about following conventions. I also want us to be aware that adding a "however" to a comma splice doesn't solve the problem. We can see an example of that in an email I received. The student is telling me quite considerately, if ungrammatically, that he won't be able to attend an upcoming writing workshop. "Hi Professor Barry, I would really like to attend the writing workshop, however, I cannot make it this Friday."" So we have something that could be its own sentence over here and something that could be its own sentence over there. Each of these is what is called an independent clause. The key elements of which are a subject, a verb, and a complete thought. It's called an independent clause, because it can exist on its own. It doesn't need anything else to count as a sentence. We'll contrast that with a dependent clause in one of the later sections of Punctuation and Professionalism. But for now, the key is to understand that when you have two independent clauses, two units that could stand alone as sentences, you can't just stick a "however" between them, or at least not without adding stronger punctuation marks than just commas. Commas plus however do not connect independent clauses. That combination is not currently acceptable as a way to hold essentially two sentences together. I said currently because attitudes on this might change, and when attitudes change, conventions change. As Rudolf Flesch writes in The Art of Readable Writing, "[T]he point is that the rules of English usage are not immutable natural laws, but simply conventions among English-speaking people. If enough people insist on making a 'mistake,' then it isn't a mistake anymore and the teachers might as well stop wasting their time correcting it."" Daniel Tammet puts this point a bit more succinctly in Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing: "Language never stops." It's always evolving, it's always being changed and challenged and experimented with. Which means perhaps someday, using "however" like my student did as a way to connect two independent clauses with just a couple of commas will be acceptable. But for now, you're much better off using a semicolon and a comma, or a period and a comma. Now, you might get some people who object to placing however at the beginning of a sentence, but that is an increasingly smaller minority. As a usage note in the highly dependable American Heritage Dictionary explains, "It is sometimes claimed that one should not use however to begin a sentence, but few writers consistently follow this rule." Of course, as I often tell my students, many of whom go on to work for judges and partners and other powerful folks who sometimes have their own way of doing things, if your boss says not to start a sentence with however, you don't start a sentence with however. At least not in your first few months on the job, and especially given that you can pretty easily move however to a different part of the sentence and get the same or even better effect. We'll learn how to do this in a future Punctuation and Professionalism segment. We'll also learn the difference between adverbial conjunctions, which is what the "however" we've been looking at is called, and coordinating conjunctions, which are words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Those cause some common comma issues, too.
