Commas in a sentence

why do you doubt im american

It's a shit sentence and if you make shit sentences, the normal rules kind of stop applying.

That said, I learned that you don't put a comma before "but" and only very sparingly before "and". The one before "and" is the only comma I wouldn't delete from that sentence.

BUT I am German so feel free to disregard my opinion.

,put them there

Then I checked to see if anyone else might have seen him - but the funeral's bartender hadn't, nor had its priest, and my aunt's only surviving husband was blind.

wtf

talk shit post edit

i never realized how awful people on this board were at writing. the sentence is pretty shitty but if you want to keep it and only fix the punctuation this is the correct version:

Then I checked to see if anyone else might have seen him, but the only living one of my aunt’s husbands was blind and neither the bartender from that day, nor the priest from the funeral, had seen anything.

This has already been said.

Me next!

Within, the shared heat between the passengers created many sweat-stained sets of winter clothing and, as a result – those who occupied the ferry’s beaten green seats had the excess proof of their discomfort added to the upholstery.

It comes across as a bit pretentious.
Also, I hate dashes.

I use the "and, as a result --" transition in other places, although in their respective situations they are more appropriate.
Anyhow, looking at the whole paragraph, it is a sentence that can definitely be omitted and nothing of importance will be lost. For that reason, I will do just that.
Thanks, user.

why do u hate dashes user

No problem I guess.

I just think that they have no purpose in fiction and are jarring to see.

Any tips for balancing description in fiction with flow? Take this paragraph for example:
Beside him, two scraggly men began loudly arguing in Beilish, the official language of Beils. One of the ruffians wore a brown armband and the other wore one that was bright orange. Between slurs, the brown-branded man threw a punch that crashed on the orange-branded man’s face. Undaunted, the orange-branded man retaliated by tackling his opponent into several other passengers who immediately pushed the two away; all the while, a murmur circulated through the crowd as they parted to make way for a pale-skinned Beilite police officer who commanded the attention of the two fighters. The police officer was dressed in a dark blue uniform and carried a holstered pistol as well as a pair of handcuffs.

Its from very early on in my piece; introduces several things -- like the language and the Beilite government's use of armbands for identification.

the rule of thumb I try to stick to is not to have more than two or three commas in a sentence unless it contains a list
that has four and it reads in a lumpy sort of way
you could just remove the last two commas and it would flow better, but it would probably be better to split this into two or three separate sentences

Does it really matter who started the fight?

unironically this
newline instead of period, intra sentence punctuation only when you feel like it
capitalize I and also proper nouns if you really want to but not other stuff
most importantly only look up once maybe twice per sentence so you don't spend time fixing typos or thinking too much about what you've typed, just look at the keyboard even if you're a touch typist
that's what you should do

This is... Pretty good actually, very smooth

Commas are out; semicolons are the new hotness.

>nor
okay william makepeace

not sure i see your point re: dashes. maybe slashes

you dont want it to be noticeable like that. when editing, try to make the descriptions feel more natural. like your showing the reader what he would want to know/look at, not the details you want to show them for later on in the story

Having a lot of commas definitely always feels juvenile to me, even when it's grammatically correct. People always seem to forget that you can phrase sentences to not need commas. And those sentences generally flow way better.

they have more purpose in fiction than elsewhere because they represent a way of speaking
the pause for a dash is usually shorter than the pause for a comma, sometimes it's even shorter than the normal pause between words
also generally the word before it is generally spoken in a different tone than one before a comma or semicolon, and instead has the tone of an intra-clause word or sentence-final word

I see dashes the same way I see semicolons, technically fine but not suitable for fiction.
Can't explain why, it's just how it is for me.

>generally the word before it is generally
whoops

Putting a comma before "and" is dependent on whether or not whatever comes after can be a complete sentence. Simple grammatical rules.

OP, everybody has their two cents, everybody would write it a little bit differently in their own way, but it's fine the way it is. a style guide would tell you to put commas between coordinated sentences, which you've done. the neither...nor comma depends on the size of the conjuncts. for instance, it would be awkward to write "neither John, nor Mary, had seen anything," but since the conjuncts in your sentence are bigger, the comma is acceptable. if the conjuncts were bigger, then the comma would seem to be obligatory. for instance "neither the bartender with grey hair who we spoke to at work that day nor the priest who had delivered a really touching oration at the funeral had seen anything" is a mess without commas.

>, but
>, and
It's not a comma splice either, just a poorly phrased (but grammatically correct) sentence.