The Ultimate Comma Guide
is a book for editors, professional writers, and students of writing. As a book for editors and professional writers, it is meant to serve as a reference to eliminate guesswork related to comma usage. Traditional instruction about comma usage has revolved around six to nine rules that may be incomplete or leave room for too much interpretation. In
, English professor and professional editor Gentry Sutton has analyzed traditional guidance about comma usage and offered instruction that is more thorough than is typical of handbooks and other references.
As a book for students of writing,
is grounded in the idea that comma usage is intricately related to a host of sentence-level terms and concepts. To master comma usage, students must understand fundamental concepts such as the difference between a clause and a phrase, the difference between an independent clause and a dependent clause, the difference between a restrictive element and a non-restrictive element, and many more. Consequently,
teaches a number of fundamental writing skills through the lens of the comma.