“The Top Twenty: A Quick Guide to Troubleshooting Your Writing” in your St. Martin’s Handbook and here.
Looking for examples in the NYT:
Commas in a non-restrictive clause (St. Martin’s 44c):
- “Groups like Teach for China, which hosted the Teach for All network at village schools here, are too new to determine whether they can make a difference in helping their lowest-
performing schools succeed.” (Friedman, 10/30) - “But this year, even before Halloween, more women seem to be finding ways to wear Gothic-influenced makeup: a look of dark lips and pale skin that has been seen on recent runways including Badgley Mischka, Yohji Yamamoto, and Louis Vuitton.” (Syme 10/29)
- “The social network, which has been built around 140-character snippets of text since its founding in 2006, has added photo and video previews to the feed of items that users see when they log onto the service from the Web or mobile applications.” (Goel 10/29)
Commas after introductory elements (44a):
- “Over all, Black Flag’s Caribbean archipelago is a nice place to be, if you don’t mind the killing.” (Totilo 10/29)
- “To put it to the test, I set out in my rental car Sunday, the day of Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, and headed south, the radio tuned to 1120 AM, to see if I could I outdrive the signal before the end of the game.” (Waldstein 10/29 — five commas)