This column is guaranteed to drive my editors crazy! Why? Because I’m about to write an exposition about what some people call the “Oxford comma.” I prefer to call it the “serial comma.” That’s the comma that comes just before the conjunction in a list of items or names. Those commas take the place of the word “and.”
Most newspapers’ style sheets, the manual that delineates the papers’ punctuation policies, just arbitrarily erase all serial commas without regard to what it does to the sense or the feel of the sentence. It’s not the editors’ fault, it’s the style sheet’s fault.
Perhaps it’s an economics thing; just imagine how much ink you’ll save over a year’s time if you drop that comma. Why, in my copy alone, there are usually at least two commas that get edited out every week. Fifty-two columns a year — 100 plus commas a year! Think of the savings!
But my guess is that it isn’t economics at all. I think it probably started back in the days when type was set by hand. Each letter and punctuation mark was on a separate little block that had to be hand-placed by a typesetter. Extra commas were extra work. But that’s not the case now. Nobody sets type by hand anymore.
I know this is a provocative topic. I can’t think of anything that gets writers and editors more fired up than debating the pros and cons of the serial comma. So I’m going to try to make a point here.
I’m sorry, editors, but I think it’s just plain wrong to erase the serial comma. I think we compromise clarity when we wipe it out. And after all, punctuation is for clarity — and sometimes for emphasis, and sometimes for rhythm.
Let me illustrate what I’m talking about here when I mention loss of clarity. (Editors, please bear with me.) Consider this example without the serial comma:“Tom, Dick and Harry are traveling together.” OK, so who exactly is traveling? Are we just telling Tom that Dick and Harry are traveling? It’s ambiguous. If I put in the serial comma, it becomes: “Tom, Dick, and Harry are traveling together.” Do you see a difference in meaning? It’s no longer ambiguous, right? Now we know that all three are traveling together.
Consider this (an example used by Mary Norris in “Between You and Me”) without the serial comma: “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” The author who wrote that dedication has some good genes, right? With parents like that, the writer should have some amazing skills. The sentence is clearly ambiguous.
With the serial comma the sentence loses its ambiguity: “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.” See how that works? But now we don’t know who her parents are, do we?
Some things naturally seem to go together like salt and pepper, bread and butter, cream and sugar, knives and forks. So if those items appeared at the end of a series, you might not need a serial comma to avoid any ambiguity: “On his sandwich, he ordered catsup, mustard, salt and pepper.” It’s perfectly clear what he wanted on his sandwich. No serial comma necessary.
But how does this sentence look to you? “The flag is red, white and blue.” It would look perfectly OK to most editors. I’d prefer a serial comma so that we have three separate colors: red, white, and blue. To me, without the serial comma, the white and blue seem mixed, like a swirl cone at the drive-in restaurant.
Well, I know this is a battle I can’t win. No amount of whining, pouting, arguing, and hair-pulling is going to change the papers’ style sheets. So maybe it should be “whining, pouting, arguing and hair-pulling.” But if this column appears in print without any serial commas, I will whine and pout and argue and pull my hair!
