Here is another change, or reform even, of English that we are living through. You are possibly not aware of it because it is a question of punctuation and who cares about that?

I’m going to say from the start, this is something you cannot get wrong if you do it the old way. If you’re worried about being “correct”, use more commas rather than fewer in this instance. (And that’s one of the few times you’ll ever see me say that.)

You can think of English sentences in many ways but at their simplest they begin from the following idea.

SVO

Subject — verb — object

This is the “ur sentence shape”. It’s unambiguously the shape of an English sentence. It may interest you to know that many languages do not use the same shape. SOV is probably more common (an example is Japanese, and German dependent clauses show that it too is fundamentally SOV). VSO is more than possible (Celtic languages, for example Welsh). And a free order is common in languages that use strict case agreement.

Of course, not every English sentence has these elements. Any sentence with an intransitive verb will lack the “O” element and imperatives do not have explicit subjects. And many have adverbial phrases that are tacked on. They theoretically belong to the verb element but in English their basic position is sentence final.

To show what I mean:

I      eat     fish

S      V       O

I      eat     fish    on Tuesdays

S     V       O       A

The subject is me (of course). The thing I do is eat. The thing I eat is fish. The time I eat it is on Tuesdays.

I’m not going to delve in any great detail into what adverbial phrases are. We’ll just say this: in the basic sentence adverbs generally describe the verb in greater detail, saying how, when, why, where, with whom or what, its action occurs. They also describe adjectives, just to be confusing, but we will not discuss that at all here. What we are concerned with is the “adverbial phrase” — the word or words that give detail about the verb.

Now, of course, when looking at the English sentence, it’s not really all that useful to analyse it in terms of subject and object. That’s because English is no longer an inflectional language and identifying the class of words is uninteresting. What’s more interesting is their function. So we would more generally see the sentence as topic-comment.

In the above sentence, I am the topic and what I do is the predicate. English isn’t a strict topic-prominent language like Japanese or Turkish because at least in speech, it cannot promote objects to sentence topics. If I say “Fish I ate”, I sound more like Yoda than DR. Some languages do in fact allow this kind of promotion.

What English does allow, and careful readers will note I have used the device very often in this piece, as I do, and most writers, good or bad, do in every piece, is fronting. Because English uses the front of the sentence to “mark” the sentence topic, it can “front” things whose basic position is elsewhere in the sentence to increase their salience.

So look at again at: I eat fish on Tuesdays.

One can instead write: On Tuesdays, I eat fish.

This is called “adverbial fronting” and I have “fronted” the adverbial phrase “on Tuesdays.

Compare:

I eat fish sometimes.

Sometimes, I eat fish.

I don’t really want to get into a discussion of what can and what can’t be fronted, since even if the rules are reasonably complex, you will have a very decent grasp of them. So you know you can write “With a glad heart, I send you five pounds” but not really “?With a pen, I wrote him a long letter”, and readily “Because I love you, I’m letting you go” (dependents are probably fronted almost equally as they are written in their basic position, although some pedants really don’t like it when you front “because” phrases) but not “*Too much, he eats fish”.

You’ll notice that the correct style for fronted adverbials has always been to comma them off and I have followed that here.

Now, wind it back to fish.

“Sometimes, I eat fish.” You may have felt a little uneasy with that sentence. And before I suggest why, let’s digress briefly.

A lot of the reading we do in the day to day is in the form of what one  might call “Newspaper English”, even when it’s online. This is a particular style of writing that’s become quite popular outside of its birthplace, which was newspapers. It tends to deploy a simple sentence structure, rather few adjectives and relatively few adverbs. It doesn’t allow extraneous words, so you’ll see far fewer “that”s than you would in most other forms of writing. “I feel he eats fish too much” is standard and “I feel that he eats fish too much” would be corrected by a sub. It also largely eschews commas, possibly because they don’t look good in newspaper print.

So in Newspaper English, you’d tend to write “Sometimes I eat fish” and indeed single adverbs are very rarely comma’d off in any form of English. Newspaper English goes further, so that “With a glad heart I send you five pounds” would be correct style. It would not generally be acceptable to write “?Because I love you I’m letting you go.”

This form of punctuating English is taking over and these days you’ll see it in most forms of writing. You probably haven’t noticed or thought about it, any more than you’d think about whether you should hyphenate “Oxford-street” (which was the case less than a hundred years ago) or use semicolons like they’re in short supply (they were much more used before the war, when a hit on the semicolon factory killed most of the world’s stock).

I applaud it. Commas are great tools for avoiding ambiguity but if they’re not really helping, why keep them? I intend to write some posts where I’ll show how they do help (and imagine I had written “if they’re not really helping why keep them?” — which is poor and I’ll explain why later).

As I say, you cannot go far wrong if you simply comma off fronted adverbials. Don’t worry about being too correct. Just stick a comma after anything at the front of the sentence that is not the subject of your sentence. If you don’t know what the subject is, well, here’s a tip. Take your sentence and find the verb. Everything after the verb cannot be the subject so ignore that. Look at the elements before the verb and cross out everything that is a word that can’t do the action of the verb. Nearly always you’ll be left with one word. That’s the subject. Or none — hey you have an imperative sentence! Then decide if the other words around that subject describe it or describe what it does.

On a wet Wednesday a dog barked loudly.

Take off everything after the verb.

On a wet Wednesday a dog barked

Wednesdays can’t bark and “On a wet” belongs with Wednesday.

A dog is our subject.

Comma off everything in front of “A dog”.

On a wet Wednesday, a dog barked.

It will probably become old fashioned to do this but for now you won’t be doing anything wrong, and you’ll have the advantage of always being right in the instances that haven’t changed and won’t change soon.