The Glaux Press Style Guide for Comma Usage: the thorniest punctuation in all the English Language.

The Glaux Press Style Guide will appear in 2025.

In the recreational standard, achievement is intended to be at the amateur level – but punctuation is not typically a recreational undertaking. The requirements of school work or professional correspondence dictate that punctuation be to a high editorial standard. But Glaux Press staff have found comma usage to be both especially treacherous and especially ubiquitous.

The Glaux Press style guide provides professionals and students with a clear and accessible guide to English language comma usage.

The style guide starts with the conceptual distinction of restrictive / non-restrictive elements of the sentence. (i.e. whether the element in question constitutes a meaning essential to the sense of the main clause, thus restrictive; or whether this element consists of supplementary meaning, thus non-restrictive.) This conceptual rule is then illustrated in its practical function in the major semantic units of: independent clause, dependent clause, simple phrase, adverb, conjunction. And of especial importance for guidance in practical application and trouble-shooting a real-life sentence – the style guide demonstrates the major rules with detailed examples; with attention to the various permutations of these semantic units (e.g. clarification of the idiosyncrasies arising with conjunctions which preface some combination of dependent clause, simple phrase, independent clause), as well as the many exceptions that arise.

The conceptual distinction of restrictive / non-restrictive is found in discussions of comma usage with relative clauses. However, such discussions are always constrained to the single, specific grammar of the relative clause. Contrariwise, the Glaux Press style guide recognizes the application of the restrictive / non-restrictive distinction to comma usage at large, to all comma usage.

There are, of course, existing style guides (MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, etc). But Glaux Press staff have found the use of commas to be especially fraught and have found existing resources (whether online or in print) to be fragmentary, narrow, and unsystematic in their exploration of the topic.

This style guide treats primarily commas ; the appendix briefly reviews the basic rules for other types of punctuation, including apostrophe, hyphen, etc.

Non-comma usage and standard academic essay formatting are adequately explained in existing style guides and online resources. The Purdue OWL site provides a Brief Overview of Punctation as part of its Punctuation resources, as well as APA and MLA formatting guidelines via its home page. The Chicago Manual of Style web site includes a Citation Quick Guide that is free and not paywalled, with separate pages for Author-Date Style (for natural sciences and social sciences) and Notes and Bibliography Style (for human sciences).