I tell my (college) students that it’s one of those rules that they need to apply in formal academic writing, but can take less seriously in other styles. Frankly, I have to admit that I tell them this mainly because I think other teachers / editors enforce it, not because I think it’s a particularly valuable rule. One difficulty, though: telling students they need to use it in formal writing doesn’t work very well if they’ve never had any exposure to the independent / dependent clause distinction, so even if we don’t present the rule until late high school or early college, the groundwork for it needs to be in place already.

 I’m not sure of its history, but I suspect it’s one of those many, many cases that started out as a helpful suggestion about warding off ambiguity and ended up being a rigid requirement.

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University

I'm wondering how many people are still teaching that placing a comma before a coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence is the rule and omitting the comma is the exception?  I have been reading through mostly fiction books for elementary and middle school readers, and in those books it is certainly the other way around.  So in teaching kids at those levels to use the comma, we are up against most of what they see in print.

Last night, I made up some compound sentences to use in a workshop for elementary and middle school teachers.  I inserted the comma before each coordinating conjunction.  Then I read most of a delightful book, Clarice Bean Spells Trouble by Lauren Child.  It is full of sentences like this:  "Grandad has actually got manners but he doesn't use them that much anymore and he hasn't let the dog see them, which is why Cement is utterly mannerless."  This morning, when I returned to my carefully made-up sentences, the commas looked like clutter: "Matthew wanted to play soccer, but the doctor said he should rest his injured leg."

I know that fiction narrated in the first person is the likeliest place to find compound sentences without commas.  But, though I haven't searched methodically, I think I have noticed them all over the place, in both fiction and nonfiction for both younger and older readers. 

I wonder  whether the comma-before-the-conjunction "rule" has become one of those pedagogic oversimplifications of reality we sometimes resort to in order to give learners something clear and secure to grasp until they're ready for more complexity.  Whether such oversimplifications are effective or justified is a whole other question.  What I think I'd prefer is a better rule.
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