Everything you know is wrong

My 32nd birthday is approaching and I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m comfortable with what I know…at least I thought I was until I discovered I’ve been using commas wrong for my entire life. Of course, you probably already knew that–you’ve read what I wrote. I took grammar classes and earned a degree in English…only to discover I’ve been completely wrong. now I either hafta unlearn 25 years of improper punctuation (not an easy task) or try to forget what I discovered and continue doing what I’ve always done (easier…but there’s a pride-thing involved).

I was doing homework and stumbled across the definition of independent clauses and this little sentence:

I didn’t know which job I wanted, and I was too confused to decide.

In my opinion, that sentence is improperly punctuated. To me, that comma is completely unnecessary. I don’t know where or why, it just is (comma splice comes to mind). I see that sentence contain two, separate ideas and they’re joined together by an ‘and.’ Alas, it takes more than an ‘and’ to join separate clauses together–you need a comma, too.

Maybe it’s because I grew in New Jersey and they’re not too keen on proper pronunciation and grammar. Adding a comma to that sentence feels so completely excessive. I would never use a comma in such a sentence nor has any teacher who corrected my work stuck a comma in there. It even looks funny to me–I don’t recall seeing a comma used in that context often in books. On rare occasions, I will stumble across a text that uses a comma there and I think to myself, That idiot doesn’t know how to use a comma. Turns out, I’m the idiot.

No–I refuse to believe I’m wrong. Am I missing something? How come no one has every corrected me? Not my parents, not my teachers, not even my peers–no one has ever inserted a comma in that situation for anything I’ve ever written. The rule is wrong–I am right.

My mother is a grammar Nazi. She taught high school and studies languages for pleasure (never challenge her to game of Scrabble). I figured if anyone could shed some light on this subject, it would be her.

“How would you punctuate the sentence ‘I didn’t know which job I wanted and was too confused to decided,'” I asked her.

“A period at the end,” she said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

And just like that, I found the source of my problem. If my mother believed that sentence didn’t warrant a comma, she would have passed that knowledge on to me. We debated the sentence for 10 minutes. I explained independent clauses to her and the arguments for inserting a comma. She defended her position by saying “It doesn’t feel right.”

…and I couldn’t agree with her more.