The purpose of punctuation is to make it clear how to read the text aloud; sometimes this affects the meaning.

So the comma in your sentence after "Every morning" indicates a pause (with a downward intonation); leaving it out would suggest "I wake up" was a relative clause.

Thus the real issue is whether a reader needs the comma after "6.00 am" in order to read it aloud and easily get the intonation/pause/sense correct.

My answer here would then be that in this simple example omitting the comma does not make it difficult to read aloud correctly straight off; however, with longer sentences of the sort common in academic writing, a comma would be very helpful and necessary.

In general media, people today often seem to omit commas wherever possible; however I would not do this in academic writing where readers may be more pedantic

@WW Quite right my dear fellow!
I just have a couple of quick questions for you:

1) Do you advise your students NOT to start a sentence with "but" when writing in an English exam?

2) Do you advise your students to comma off "comment" such as "Personally" at the start of a sentence?

The point here is that without a style guide or some element of prescriptivism, no one knows what is right or wrong: for instance if I write "the provided information" the meaning is clear and unambiguous, although the phrase is not in the normal word order: correct or exellent?

Beyond my scope to comment on the societal ills of American culture.

Maybe because the meaning can be unclear - "very" or "somewhat" ?

Deeming "pretty" as informal seems to predate the wave of political correctness so I wonder wherher it was just some post-Victorian academic snobbery, in the same way as in the decade following WWII was taught at school not to use "get", which apparently was an ugly lower-class word. I would guess it was at school that I acquired (or got) the idea that "pretty" was unacceptable in formal writing. Blame the teacher(s)! Not sure where they got the idea from though.

With other words we have seen, just over one generation, "unseemly" become "inappropriate"; and words like "old", "elderly", "fat" become scarcely polite under the influence of political correctness, but the idea that "pretty" is informal seems to predate that.

@WW My thesis would be that modal verbs in English are used in much the same way as they are in German, Dutch and languages like Frisian. Thus in German the past subjunctive "must", "could", "might", "dared" is distinguishable from the past indicative: musste vs muesste and so on.

In English we do not mark the disctinction, but it is still there: German does not mark the subjuctive for "would" and "should" either, but one can use "should" in German instead of "if" in just the same way as in English.

The usage of the past subjunctive to express politeness with a present meaning is very similar too. Thus "She should come" = "Sie sollte kommen" - unmarked past subjunctive, talking about now

The point of all this is it explains how our present usage developed and provides a framework for teaching rather than just saying sometimes it's like this and sometimes it's like that.

Essentially all I'm suggesting is that modals have a real and an unreal past just like any other verb; but they also have a third meaning - the past (subj) used as a polite present. When one adds that the real past is mostly not used as a main clause, we have pretty much explained all modal verb usage in one fell swoop.

My understanding is that the widespread use of "issue" to supplant "problem" stems from a desire to be more positive, particularly when broaching a topic with your boss. "Issue" has become just another management speak weasel word.

One should move on to the next level, becoming a TOP person (totally-oriented-positive) leapfrogging hurdles and challenges in one smooth single bound....

Actually the subjunctive is around quite a bit even though it is unmarked. Modal verbs have a 'real' past tense in reported speech:
"She said she would do it"
Modal verbs also use the past subjunctive with present meaning for politeness:
"Could I come in?"
They also use past subjunctive to indicate unreal/hypothetical ideas:
"I would be surprised if ...."
In a main clause only, to distinguish an unreal past idea from real, we usually add a perfect infinitive to the past subjuctive of the modal:
"I would have been surprised if ..."
The point here is that when the use of past subjunctive for politeness developed in the early Middle Ages, we lost the ability to clearly use it to refer to the past. The usage of "had" in the main clause of a past conditional sentence is a throwback (which BTW mirrors modern German):
"Haette ich das gewusst, haette ich es Ihnen erzaehlt"
"Had I known, had I told you"

@WW but why not "a ten-days' tour", "a four-hours' trip" ?
Anything beyond "because that's not what people say" ?

One would need to distinguish between "non-semantic" vs "idioms & collocations" vs "meaningful but seldom used" ; thus:
"a glass of wine" is partitive; "a wine's glass" hard to construe;
"the car's door" might be okay, esp in "the car's passenger door jammed"
"at the door of death" - unusual but grammatically okay
"cow milk" is not wrong but usually "cows' milk" cf "goats' milk"
and so forth.

Another issue:
"ten days' travel", "four hours' walk" but "a ten-day tour", "a four-hour trip"

LLAP

@WW I would lump your examples Groups...Descriptions together as partitive/compositional.

As you may have guessed by now, this all arises when some non-native speaker innocently asks the question: so when can the genitive be used when it's not a person?

As you rightly point up, it is quite quirky:
A) "The British occupation of India"
B) "England's long occupation of India"
C) "The long English occupation of India" - almost sounds as if "long" modifies "English"

D) "The windscreen's wiper" - does the windscreen only have one wiper?
E) "A windscreen's wiper is made up of six components"

F) "The bar chart's most striking feature is ...."
G) "The most striking feature of the bar chart is...."

My comment on (F) would be if one persistently used genitives like this (instead of "of" ), the text as a whole could become too convoluted or dense; academic and professional English writing fairly seldom contains genitives not referring to people or proper names:
"the patient's blood pressure" - ok ;
"the blood pressure's sudden spike" -> the sudden spike in blood pressure.

She would have died there and then, were it not for the sudden arrival of the medics