Participants in this workshop will undertake an inductive study of the rules that govern the use of commas. First we’ll work to punctuate passages of text from which commas have been removed. We’ll then compare those guesses with the original text, making observations about how commas are used in each instance, thinking about why they are used, and attempting to formulate the rules that dictate their usage. Students will be encouraged to make observations about the use of commas in everything they read and to apply those patterns to their own writing, rather than simply memorizing complicated and abstract punctuation rules that writers at every level struggle to master.