Comma titles that follow a name: "John Smith, Ph.D." Similarly in lists that are presented with an inversion: "...; socks, green: 3 pairs; socks, red: 2 pairs; tie, regimental: 1". Commas may be used to indicate that a word, or a group of words, has been omitted, as in "The cat was white; the dog, brown." (Here the comma replaces "was".) Commas are placed before, after, or around a noun or pronoun used independently in speaking to some person, place or thing: In his 1785 essay "An Essay on Punctuation", Joseph Robertson advocated a comma between the subject and predicate of
Slash (punctuation) a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (, which was used as a period, scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark .) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in France, where it was also used to mark the continuation of a word onto the next line of a page, a sense later taken on by the hyphen . The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a