Two useful articles from the New York Times ’ Opinionator column: Ben Yagoda’s Fanfare for the Comma Man and its sequel The Most Comma Mistakes . The editors I assume wrote the titles and Yagoda should not be blamed for them, though I fully understand the temptation the editors faced and failed to overcome. His book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing is quite good, as is his history of The New Yorker .
For what it’s worth, I disagree with him about comma splices. Sometimes only a comma splice gives the effect you want, as in, as it happens, his first example, where his suggested semi-colon might make more of a break or pause than the writer wants — would make more of a break than I would want if I wrote the sentence, anyway. It’s the difference between touching the brake as you go past the stop sign and actually slowing to look both ways.*
