Sprout

adam June 3rd, 2009

Gardening is my hobby but words are my business. I relax with tomatoes and work with sentences. Writing and gardening both fascinate me, and writing about gardening fuses those interests. Bad writing frustrates me as much as bad gardening - but they produce some amusing moments.

I noticed yesterday on the back cover of Eliot Coleman’s New Organic Grower, a book I often use for reference, a punctuation mistake that creates an interesting, if unintended, picture of the author.

It says, “Eliot Coleman is a garden tool consultant and co-host with his wife Barbara Damrosch of the popular television series, ‘Gardening Naturally,’ on the Learning Channel.”

This implies that Eliot Coleman has more than one wife and that the Learning Channel has just one popular series. These implications hinge on a punctuation mark, the comma. To explain, an “essential phrase” contains information critical for a reader’s comprehension and is not set off from the rest of a sentence by commas. A “nonessential phrase” provides information that may be helpful for a reader’s comprehension, but if it were missing, the reader would not be misled. A nonessential phrase is set off from the rest of the sentence by commas.

Eliot Coleman has only one wife. Her name, Barbara Damrosch, is a nonessential phrase, because it only adds to a reader’s comprehension. Let’s say Coleman had two wives. In that case, Barbara Damrosch would be an essential phrase because a reader wouldn’t know which wife Coleman co-hosted the show with if it were not stated.

Perhaps Gardening Naturally is the Learning Channel’s only popular series. I’ve never watched the Learning Channel (maybe they have cool grammar shows?). If it is, the title of the show is correctly set off with commas. If not, The New Organic Grower incorrectly portrays them as a one-hit network.

Now that I’ve proven that the author of Sprout, Adam Grybowski, is a big dork (notice those commas - Adam Grybowski is a nonessential phrase because Sprout only has one author), I’m going to sign off for the day.

• oh and by the way