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On the Web, I see contradicting examples of the comma usage:

[…], and as a professor I am committed to creating such a positive impact in the lives of my students as well.

(Source: http://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~sujaya_maiyya/assets/papers/Application_Statements.pdf .)

As a professor I am committed to engage and nurture that same passion in my students.

(Source: http://www.augsburg.edu/faculty/zobitz .)

As a professor, I am committed to creating an equitable and inclusive learning environment within my classes.

(Source: http://christensen.sites.grinnell.edu/teaching.html .)

Two asides are worth being made. First, don't believe every piece of advertisement they produce, especially if it's formulated so elusively and fuzzily. We don't know what the folks are really committed to; it could be their kids if they have any, otherwise their research. Second, though the texts from which the examples are drawn might not be ideal, and we even expect that they might be wrong in grammatical aspects, nothing prevents us from taking excerpts from there because we do NOT claim that this is how you should write.

Having said this, I wonder whether the comma in “As/as a professor(,)” that starts a main clause is

  1. wrong,
  2. optional, or
  3. correct?

Any why? If the comma is optional, when to use it and when not to use it?

AlMa1r
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  • Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion may be removed. – tchrist Feb 27 '24 at 00:52

1 Answers1

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There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this. Generally, prepositional phrases at the start of a sentence are set off with commas, but if they’re short (guides often define “short” as three or fewer words), the comma is often omitted. So it’s just a matter of what sort of tone the writer is going for, i.e., optional.

GrammarCop
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  • Thx! Please say how the presence or the absence of the comma affects the tone. – AlMa1r Feb 25 '24 at 12:19
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    I think adding the comma naturally elicits a pause there, which to me emphasizes the fact that the speaker is a professor, as if they really wanted to draw attention to that. But overall there’s not a huge difference. – GrammarCop Feb 29 '24 at 21:23
  • Got it. Thank you! – AlMa1r Feb 29 '24 at 22:34