A handsome man who

[Bassim]

Would you please take a look at these two sentences and correct my mistakes. I am not sure if I have punctuated them correctly.

John was a handsome man who carried himself with self-confidence which made him attractive to women. Indeed, he could pick almost any women in the town.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I would put a comma before "which".

 

[MikeNewYork]

Too many commas for me.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I could read the first as a defining clause. Besides, comma "rules" are not set in stone. When they screw up a sentence, they can be omitted.

 

[Bassim]

I have tried for years to learn to correctly punctuate non-defining and defining clauses, and still I make mistakes. And although I know the rules, and I have posted many sentences on this forum with such sentences, I am still not sure when I write those sentences. I am wondering if native speakers have problems in recognizing the difference between non-defining and defining clauses. I think that for non-native speakers of English, this is the one of the main difficulties regarding English grammar.

 

[MikeNewYork]

Even native speakers can disagree.

 

[Rover_KE]

To me, the meaning is clear without any commas, but I would change 'any women' to 'any woman'.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I thought about that too.