therefore (1).
Today: Punctuation Around.
One must take care in the punctuation of “therefore.” When a comma appears before “therefore,” the preceding word gets emphasized {it was John, therefore, who deserved the accolades} (suggesting that somebody else got the accolades but didn’t deserve them). Or you can reverse the order of the words to put “therefore” just before the word needing emphasis, but without surrounding commas {it was therefore John who deserved the accolades}.
But the word is often mispunctuated. To see the false emphasis in each of the following examples, read the word preceding “therefore” as if it were strongly stressed:
o “He was a Roman Catholic and felt all citizens of the country should share his religious beliefs. He, therefore, began to arrest all Orthodox Catholics.” “Catholics, Nazis in World War II,” Providence J.-Bull., 22 Aug. 1997, at B7. (Read: “He therefore began to arrest all Orthodox Catholics.”)
o “The results would allow parents in Alabama to know how their children fared against children in Minnesota and they, therefore, could agitate for better instruction when their children fell behind.” Jim Wooten, “Setting School Agenda,” Atlanta J.-Const., 10 Sept. 1997, at A12. (Read: “The results would allow parents in Alabama to know how their children fared against children in Minnesota, and they could therefore agitate for better instruction when their children fell behind.”)
Next: Run-on Sentences, “therefor,” and “thereby.”
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Quotation of the Day: “In prose [as opposed to poetry], euphony is a more negative quality, being concerned with keeping the diction clear from the jolts and harshnesses which when present draw away the reader’s attention from the thought to infelicities of form. Such infelicities are inadvertent; they have to be remedied, therefore, by constantly subjecting the work to the test of reading aloud, or better, by cultivating the habit of mentally hearing whatever is written. It is thus that the ear justly becomes, in a very important sense, the arbiter of style.” John F. Genung, The Working Principles of Rhetoric 155 (1902).
