![]() ![]() He uses another famous example sentence to demonstrate his point: “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.” This is, of course, a sentence that argues for the use of the Oxford comma to avoid troubling questions of these famous figures being stripper names, or strippers themselves.īut Lubin argues that the premise of this sentence can be used for the opposite argument as well. Gus Lubin in his Business Insider article, “The Oxford Comma is Extremely Overrated,” asserts that both use and non-use of the serial comma can cause equal levels of confusion. It is dangerous to assume such a cookie-cutter attitude toward language, and I must ask – how dare you? Writers won’t always be able to casually throw the end of their list, their “my parents” in the previous example, to the front of the line. The author could easily have reasons to order their list in a way which demands the use of an Oxford comma. Secondly, not all sentences are to be best served by a rearrangement of order. Why put the onus on the reader to have to sparse the potential groupings of your list when you can simply and quickly clarify yourself with an easy and efficient Oxford comma? ![]() I say that this idea of rearrangement instead of a serial comma is inefficient at best and a dangerous precedent at worst.įirst of all, the addition of an innocent and clarifying Oxford comma is way more grammatically efficient than the split-second of confusion that its lack will ensure. Those fighting against the Oxford comma will say that the above sentence merely needs more careful arranging so as not to indicate that you were the child of Ayn Rand and God, like this: “This book is dedicated to Ayn Rand, God and my parents.” Sentences like “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God” have been much-discussed among the passionate and illiterate alike (as always, the passionate are the ones that agree with me, the illiterate are the ones who oppose me. There are some now widely-seen examples out there pleading for use of the Oxford comma. And the Oxford comma, also known as a serial comma, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is “an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list.” The definition goes on further to explain that “it can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words: These items are available in black and white, red and yellow, and blue and green.” For example, in the majority of my writing now, I can no longer write that something was “okay,” but have to express that it was “OK.” I don’t even write OK in my texts it has always seemed like an odd spike in volume to me.īut the biggest point of stress in this transition by far has been the emotional loss of my dear Oxford commas. This transition has not come completely without stress. I am going through a bit of a traumatic experience at the moment – the introduction to journalism and its accompanying Associated Press style of writing, after years spent instead in English classes for my minor. I wish to talk to you today about something of extreme importance: the always-controversial Oxford comma.
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