Last week I discussed commas and how to properly use them for pauses versus parentheticals. This week I want to elaborate a bit more on the parentheticals.
Here’s my parenthetical example from last week:
“His mother, Kathleen, bakes the best cakes.”
The commas work here because he has only one mother. This can be applied to other instances where there’s only one of something. Example:
“His wife, Jessica, works the night shift.”
He has only one wife.
Nouns like “mother” and “wife” are usually pretty straightforward, but you have to be more careful when working with nouns that aren’t. Consider the following sentence.
“My sister, Tara, lives out of state.”
Those commas indicate I have only one sister. But. The meaning changes if we remove those commas.
“My sister Tara lives out of state.”
The lack of commas in this sentence tells us that I have more than one sister.
All this is just a reminder to be extra careful when placing (or not placing) commas around nouns. They have more to do with meanings than you might think.
Timothy