Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Doesn't it depend on how you look at it? If I had started with:
"It's my life. Whatever you say, I'll do what I want."
and wanted to join those with a conjunction I would end up with:
"It's my life, and whatever you say, I'll do what I want."
Are you suggesting that is incorrect in normal prose? I would argue otherwise - judging from what I've seen in professionally edited texts.
If you look back over my previous post, I chose this example because it was originally two main clauses joined with a conjunction. The fact that the comma (before the "and") might be considered optional in this case does not exclude the fact that it would (also) be correct to have it there (at least when the subclause is not present). If we also place commas according to the fact the "and" is not part of the inessential clause, then we might end up with:
"It's my life, and, whatever you say, I'll do what I want."
which I have seen, but only rarely.
It's this sort of thing that holds me back from jumping to judgment on other people's use of commas. Yes, there are places where a comma may always be considered correct (in the general sense), but there are fewer of them than many seem to assume. This is especially true when when considering narrative text. On the other hand, as suggested by my first cynical comment on this thread, there are lots of wrong places to put them.
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I think I see now.
"It's my life, and whatever you say, I'll do what I want."
Here, the optional first comma separates the two main clauses ("It's my life" and "I'll do what I want"). The "whatever you say" remains a dependent clause of "I'll do what I want".
"It's my life, and, whatever you say, I'll do what I want."
Here the extra second comma is correct because "whatever you say" is non-essential. But because the optional first comma is retained, the second is normally removed else the sentence becomes comma-heavy.
Fun stuff!