Sunday, October 1, 2017

Comma sense: Grammar and Usage Case

Working on a sentence that's bothering me:



After a few minutes, a thin blue-eyed girl, wearing black stockings and wrapped tightly in a silver mink, kicked over the can with her white tennis shoe.




  1. It feels like it should be written without commas but I don't like how it reads—it feels unclear. But I don't know if putting commas there is grammatically correct. Is it?



I also thought about writing it with an em dash, which I think is grammatically correct, but stylistically it calls too much attention to it:




...a thin blue-eyed girl—wearing black stockings and wrapped tightly in a silver mink—kicked over...



So, is it grammatically correct with or without the commas?




  1. Should there be a comma between thin and blue-eyed? I tried the test of reversing it: ...a blue-eyed thin girl... which doesn't sound right, so I figured no comma based on the rules for compound adjectives, but I'm still not sure.



Thanks!

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