Everyone Should Relax on the Oxford Comma
If you’re looking for a grammatical convention that’s guaranteed to provoke an unduly indignant debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [editor’s note: I don’t know what I would call unnecessary] . You see, the Oxford comma is not just an old comma – it is a comma that maintains lexical order and makes things readable, at least that’s what its proponents believe. It requires a capital O, damn it. There are two arguments at the heart of the discussion, but before choosing a side, you need to know what it is, how it is used, and why it tends to annoy people on both sides of the break. (Although if you read carefully, you can tell which camp the Lifehacker falls into).
What is an Oxford comma?
It sounds so fantastic, like it was handcrafted in the Ivy League grammar factory. The Oxford comma, also known as an ordinal comma or serial comma, is a comma placed before the final conjunction (usually and / or) in a list of three or more elements.
Or, as Oxford University (who else?) Aptly puts it :
When you write a list, you naturally include commas to separate each item, but the Oxford comma is when you also put a comma before “and [Final Item]”.
Here is an example of an Oxford comma in the wild:
He enjoyed drinking soda, reading comics, and riding the Razor scooter.
Without the Oxford comma, this sentence would be:
He enjoyed drinking soda, reading comics, and riding the Razor scooter.
Okay, simple enough. But why do some of his supporters go into hysterics when they don’t use him? And in what contexts is it traditionally ignored?
When is the Oxford comma used? (When should it be?)
Newspapers usually omit the Oxford comma, but make caveats when its inclusion is necessary for clarity. In the olden days – when printed newspapers never died – newsprint provided limited space, which meant that even a tiny, perhaps unnecessary, comma could bring an article out into the margins.
But other than this special, esoteric circumstance, there are really no clear rules governing when it should be used. Rather, it is mainly a preference, with American English being preferred a little more often than our British counterparts. Many publications do not require strict adherence to the Oxford comma and only require it to be used when absolutely necessary for clarity.
Here are some examples of how this can be effectively deployed, again courtesy of the University of Oxford:
They sent gifts to her sons Kate and Sophie.
Without the comma before the last union, it would be forgiven for the assumption that “her sons” are called Kate and Sophie.
Could you please bring me some bread and cheese, orange juice and lemonade, and sweets for my throat.
As the university notes, “without the Oxford comma, the sentence becomes harder to read because there are already other conjunctions grouping pairs of things that belong together as separate items on the list.” All of this seems fair, but what about the proposals, which do not necessarily put the latter explaining the comma? Signal for debate (and righteous hand-wringing).
Why is the debate going on?
In fact, there are purists who believe that the Oxford comma should be a constant feature in all grammatical contexts, and others who find such strict use superfluous.
In fact, one of the main arguments against the Oxford comma is that some sentences are better reformulated to remove the ambiguity that the absence of a comma sometimes unintentionally creates.
To illustrate, here’s an example from Grammerly : “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty” is definitely preferable to “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty”. But it could be changed to say, “I love Lady Gaga, Humpty Dumpty and my parents.” The latter example is much less confusing, ruining any possibility that Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty could raise a child together without salting the dish with, so to speak, punctuation marks.
Be that as it may, the Oxford comma definitely has its uses, although it is sometimes overkill. After all, it is just a comma, so there is no need to write a treatise to support its use in all contexts.