I volunteered; I sure did, without so much as a thought of,  what if I can’t think of what to write or scarier still, what if people don’t like what I write? Naw, I didn’t think of that, not until I actually sold my idea to Damienb. Now I must follow through. This isn’t exactly Face Book either where I can count on family and friends to like whatever I write, but then who ever got to be a paid writer by writing just for family and friends? Nobody that’s who! So I will swallow my pride and all my fear here and just plunge right ahead.

I have actually been writing most of my life. Even as a child, to placate my younger sisters, I would make up elaborate stories to tell them as they lay huddled together in the bed next to mine. To this very day if someone says, “tell me a story” I am apt to try. So here I am on the Newbie Writers Blog site to impart some bits {and believe me they will only be bits here} of wisdom that I learn along the way to becoming a published, paid writer.

I am fascinated lately it seems, with commas. Have you ever gotten hung up writing some thing and couldn’t figure out if a comma belonged to that sentence and if so why and if not, why not? No? Well maybe I am a little weird but there is quite a bit written on the subject of commas. Take for instance “The Little Book”. Never heard of it? Oh, I’ll bet you have, it is otherwise known as “ The Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E. B. White. I found this book a few years back when taking a paralegal course. I keep it in the bathroom and read it over and over again.

The Elements of Style privately published by the author, an English professor, in 1919 and later collaborated on and added to his “little “ book was E. B. White of Charlottes Web fame. In their book Strunk & White imparts a compendium of rules and principles of writing. I scan this little book almost daily it seems to check on the usage of a verb or noun, and of course the comma and its use has been addressed here as well.

The quest to find the correct usage of commas led me to other resources as well, like the piece written on the subject by Dawn Copeman. In her article Dawn tells the reader/writer the many nuances of the plain old comma. She teaches that the comma can be used in many ways, and if you notice, this little blog has a bunch of commas running through it.

The comma, can for instance, be used as a “serial” comma separating a number of items one from the other. An example of this would be; the clown ran through the tent and the elephant, the monkey, the big cat and the giraffe followed too.

There are numerous rules about commas when to use them and when not to, and if I were writing a paper for a classroom there would be much more written on this subject, but this is just a blog and I am only trying to write about what I am learning as I teach myself to write.

I have used commas in this blog for emphasis, for separating a list of things and I have not used a comma to enclose a parenthetic expression in the second paragraph of this piece.

I hope that you have made it to this point in my blog this morning and that the information imparted here is helpful. As for me, I will be writing my little heart out here, now that I have finally come to the point in my life where I actually have “time” to write, may I learn to do it well.