The pause that annoys

Are you Brit or Yank? Show me your quotation marks And I’ll tell you which. I won’t be competing for a coffee mug, but NPD seems like the perfect opportunity to explore a subtle rule of punctuation that has probably cost publishers way, way more than its benefit to readers warrants.

You probably know the rule about setting off nonrestrictive elements — the descriptive bits that could be omitted without changing the essential meaning of a sentence — with commas: “The berries, which were moldy, went straight into the compost.” Well, it also applies to words in apposition, which are sometimes restrictive and sometimes not. The Chicago Manual of Style explains it this way: If you write “My older sister, Betty, taught me the alphabet,” you are implying that Betty is your only older sister. But if you write “My sister Enid lets me hold her doll” — with no commas around the name — Enid is not your only sister.

The rule is not hard to apply, if you know Betty and Enid’s sibling situations. But what if you don’t? In a New Yorker article last year, John McPhee remembered facing this problem when fact-checking his 2003 book, “The Founding Fish.” In his draft, he had “Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to ‘buy for me a four joynted, strong fishing Rod.’ ” But McPhee didn’t know whether Margaret’s name needed commas; was she an only daughter? The punctuation “would, in effect, say whether Penn had one daughter or more than one,” he wrote. “The commas were not just commas; they were facts.”

But were they important facts? It’s easy enough to find out how many children William Penn had (yes, Margaret had a sister). But suppose the father in question was a more obscure figure, or a fictional character. How much time should you spend finding the answer — commas or no commas — to a question nobody’s asking?