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The AOA recommends washing glasses every morning, paying special attention to the frames and earpieces, where hair product and makeup tend to rub off.
In this sentence, shouldn't the comma be dropped? I mean the comma placed right before "paying" should be omitted.
Punctuation is conventional. Its goal is clarity. Since the written word lacks some of the characteristics of the spoken word, we use punctuation to indicate the structure of sentences, clauses, and phrases, as well as for some other things, such as exclamations or questions.
The convention is to place a comma between the main clause and a gerund-headed clause that acts as an adverbial modifier of the predication in the main clause:
They walked along the beach, looking for pretty seashells.
In speech, there would be a brief syntactic pause after "beach", signaling the structural division of the sentence into main clause and augmentative clause.
Phrases like "along the beach" tend to be spoken as units. If one were to measure the micro-pauses in the sentence, one would see that its syntactic units are demarcated by pauses of varying duration, creating rhythms known as "parsing rhythms".
Whether in such a simple sentence the comma is required for clarity is debatable. It probably is not, at least for most competent native speakers who are familiar with this structural pattern. But the comma does no harm, and the sentence is hardly overly punctuated.
In your example, I see no need for the comma after "earpieces".
