6/4/2023 0 Comments Namely commaI create birth announcements and at the bottom we list the names of the members of the family such as Victor, Melissa, Kevin, Jenna, Olivia, Gabrielle and Hunter. My main reason for searching this site was to determine if the comma before the and is needed in a list of names. From my understanding the sentiment on this issue has changed several times over the years. I learned to use it in the ’80s and I was being taught be 80 year old teachers who wanted things to be done the way they did it as a child. The debate about whether to use it or not has been around for a long, long time. This is not a good reason to set a grammar precedent.Īs for the Oxford comma being a new invention, that is just plain false. Most newspaper authorities (AP, New York Times, etc.) request to not use the comma for space reasons. I would not call following these style guides incorrect or lazy. Many style guides say to use the Oxford Comma. Is ruffles my dog or are there three seperate animals? There are cases where the Oxford comma is ambiguous and cases where its omission is ambiguous. NK, who defines proper English? I would think Oxford University is a fairly authoritarian source on the matter and they say to use the comma – despite the fact that its use is less standard in Britain and the US. That is one of the chief purposes of punctuation and one of the chief rules of writing. However, I still recommend that for most purposes a comma be used before “and” in a series to avoid ambiguity. An extra comma adds extra space to the typesetting. Newspapers and the like often have limited space for publication. The AP Stylebook, most often used for newspapers and other media, does recommend the comma be omitted before the “and.” I believe this is because AP style focuses more on brevity. The use of the comma is most helpful to delineating what constitutes a separate entity in a list and also serves to avoid ambiguity. The latest edition of Chicago (which is one of the most often used style guides) recommends using the oxford or serial comma. For my editing classes in college, we followed the Chicago Manual of Style. As a background, I grew up being taught in elementary school through high school you use a comma in a series. I am an editor, and I believe that using a comma after “and” is most beneficial for a variety of reasons. It remains a mystery for me as to how it got started and an even deeper one as to why it continues. I do not recall, offhand, ever seeing it in the fiction or non-fiction of any published writers prior to recent times. (BTW, did anyone here have a problem understanding that previous sentence because it lacks an extra comma?) Having written professionally (as in “for pay) for hundreds of magazines, newspapers, websites, pamphlets, manuals and commercial publications, I have never had an editor insert that extra comma. I can tell you it wasn’t taught in any of the 6 different Catholic grade schools I attended as our family moved around in the 30s and 40s, nor was it taught in the Jesuit prep high school in any of the three languages that were required. Many here report that this was taught in school, confirming to me that it is a recent affectation. Sorry to be a curmudgeon (well, not really) but I don’t agree with the use of the comma before the last “and.”
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