Comma Queen Alyssa Baille and Comma King Preston Eide. /Submitted photo
Riverview School eighth grade students have officially mastered the concepts for the uses of commas. To celebrate, 8th grade students were crowned “Comma King” and “Comma Queen,” and they were awarded their edible “Comma Cookie” trophy and walked around, in costume, as royalty for a day. This year’s comma royalty were Preston Eide and Alyssa Baille. Alyssa was the top achiever, earning 200 points for practicing comma rules with 40-plus people!
In order to be crowned King & Queen, the students had to wear a comma necklace for one week, and collect signatures from teachers and other staff or adults. To collect a signature, they had to explain all of the uses of a comma. It got competitive, and in the end there were several students competing with close to 200 points, but no one quite topped Alyssa.
“Way to go 8th graders on all of your effort, and thank you to all of the staff and other supporters who took the time to listen to the rules and sign the students’ necklaces!” said eighth grade teacher Cari McBurney. “You’ve all played a part in helping motivate our youth to understand how to correctly use commas.”
What a wonderful project. Congratulations to Alyssa and Preston. They may be aware of the following quotation from Gertrude Stein, She wasn’t enamored with the comma. I have always enjoyed her comments. However, I tend to follow the rules in my writing.
And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath. It is not like stopping altogether has something to do with going on, but taking a breath well you are always taking a breath and why emphasize one breath rather than another breath. Anyway that is the way I felt about it and I felt that about it very very strongly. And so I almost never used a comma. The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one after another, the more the very more I had of them the more I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma.
So that is the way I felt about punctuation in prose, in poetry it is a little different but more so …
— Gertrude Stein
from Lectures in America
Thank you for publishing – it is so encouraging for students! 🙂