Nothing gets us in trouble more as a writer than misusing punctuation. A misplaced comma can often change the meaning of what we are saying and confuse our readers. To help you understand the basic rules, I am going to keep the sample sentences very basic.   First rule:  Any part of a sentence that can be deleted without changing the basic meaning of the sentence should have commas before and after that word, clause, or phrase.   Example: Oslo, who is my smallest dog, is lear