FAIR COPY [PROOF]
I can’t think of a more delightful venue for making the most of your retirement than Burgundy Estates in the heart of the country with its good air, brilliant light and beautiful vistas.
FOUL COPY [MARKED PROOF]
I can’t think of a more delightful venue for making the most of your retirement than Burgundy Estates [INSERT COMMA , ] in the heart of the country [INSERT COMMA , ] with its good air, brilliant light and beautiful vistas.
ADVICE
Young Americans may be inured to the breathless British style of omitting punctuation to set off introductory or subordinate clauses. They may accept without complaint the burden of figuring out for themselves where one part of a sentence ends and another begins.
Americans of a certain age will not like sentences which do not use commas to indicate introductory or subordinate clauses. They would consider omission of these marks to be faulty punctuation. Bad manners, too: a lack of consideration for the reader’s time.
Curmudgeons may even regard the omission as proof of a decline in standards — a result of dumbed-down schools, and News Corp’s infiltration of British hacks into American media.
NOTE
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends dashes — instead of commas — to set off clauses. I strongly concur: dashes improve clarity.
