Super Serial
The Most Controversial Comma You’ll Ever Meet
“There are people who embrace the Oxford comma, and people who don't, and I'll just say this: Never get between these people when drink has been taken.”
—Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
I feel like this is going to be a short article. It’s an entire article about just one character. One piece of punctuation. Not even all commas, just one specific type of comma. It’s one comma, Michael, what could it cost? Ten pages? That said, any time I threaten to write a short article I doom myself to write an unreasonably long article so hopefully I have not done just that. Short, sweet, and to the point. To the comma, I mean.
A thing about commas that your teachers and editors do not want you to know is that their use is about 90 percent arbitrary. If I wanted, I could write out the hard-and-fast rules of comma use for you but to be quite honest there are not that many and most of them are flexible. It’s usually worse to put a comma in a place where it does not belong than to omit a comma you technically should include, but you have to mess commas up pretty badly to really cause a problem.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being chastised about a comma splice but most of the time a comma splice is not going to affect the meaning of what you are saying nor the readability of your prose. It’s a nonissue. I’m sorry to all the high school English grammar teachers out there who apparently get a bonus based on how many comma splices they find in student papers.
You’re supposed to use a comma to separate independent clauses when they are joined by a coordinating conjunction, like so:
The girl wrote, and the boy painted.
There you have two independent clauses, joined by a coordinating conjunction, correctly separated by a comma. If you remove the coordinating conjunction and leave the comma, suddenly it’s a comma splice:
The girl wrote, the boy painted.
Would a semicolon have been better there? Probably. Is any reader confused by what you wrote? Probably not. Meanwhile, what if you were to write:
The girl wrote and the boy painted.
In this example, omitting the comma does not affect your intended meaning. No one who reads that will be confused about what is happening. I don’t think that most readers—if any reader—will be tripped up by the lack of punctuation. On the other hand, what happens if you insert a comma where it’s not indicated?
The girl wrote and the boy, painted.
This one is clearly wrong. Most readers will still be able to understand what was meant here, even though a comma has been erroneously inserted. However, the misused comma will trip the reader’s eye and they’ll have to disengage from your prose to understand why they tripped. It’ll cost the reader a moment or two to figure out what happened here and make sure they understood the sentence correctly before they can re-engage with the writing. You want to avoid that.
Finally, consider this construction:
The girl, wrote, and the boy, painted.
Now the sentence trips up the reader and doesn’t make sense. If your reader finds this in the text, they’re going to have to stop and read it two or three times to try and sort out what you’re saying. Are you saying the girl was written (she’s text) and the boy was painted (he’s an artwork)? What do you even mean here?
All this is to say: Placing commas where they do not belong is a more serious sin, most of the time, than omitting a comma that is technically indicated. Further, commas do much of the heavy lifting to convey the cadence of speech in written form—so I think it’s okay to use them with artistic license. Nobody likes a comma pedant. I endeavor not to be a comma pedant.
Except when we are talking about my good friend, the serial comma. Pedantry engaged.
The serial comma (also called the series comma, listing comma, Oxford comma, and Harvard comma—please let me know if it has more names that I missed) is the comma that you put after the penultimate item, before the “and,” in a series of items:
I went to the store to buy apples, pears, bananas, and apricots.
The third comma in that sentence is the serial comma. Can you omit it the serial comma and still be understood? Sometimes:
I went to the store to buy apples, pears, bananas and apricots.
In this version, the reader will still understand that the subject of the sentence went to the store to purchase four types of fruit. Omitting the serial comma in this case does not create ambiguity. There are plenty of instances where skipping the serial comma does lead to ambiguity, though. One of the two most famous examples:
I’d like to thank my parents, God and Ayn Rand.
A storied lineage, indeed, for any writer. I must say I don’t think I would be inclined to read a book that was dedicated to God and Ayn Rand. Different strokes. The lack of serial comma in that example creates unintentional hilarity, but most readers can figure out what the writer meant. Now, how about in this construction:
Maine’s overtime laws exempt employees who do the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of foods.
What do you think: Is “packing for shipping or distribution” one task, meaning, the task of packing foods for either shipping or distribution? Or are “packing for shipment” and “distribution” two different tasks—the task of packing and the task of distribution? Does someone who drives a truck to distribute food, but who does not pack it, qualify for overtime pay? Or are they exempt from receiving overtime pay? Oakhurst Dairy bet wrong on the missing serial comma and it cost them $5 million.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to the serial comma:
Use it all the time to be consistent.
Use it only when needed to clarify ambiguity.
No one except the most ardent grammar anarchist will argue that you should never use the serial comma. You certainly need it sometimes to avoid ambiguity.
The major style manuals in the United States that mandate omission of the serial comma are the AP Stylebook and the New York Times Stylebook, and that is why they are the worst manuals. Just kidding! There’s actually a lot of reasons why they are the worst manuals, their stance on the serial comma being only one.
The major manuals in the United States that mandate using the serial comma in all series are all the other ones, but, since you asked, CMS, AMA, APA, CSE, US GPO, and Strunk and White. It is worth noting that AMA (American Medical Association), CSE (Council of Science Editors), and APA (American Psychological Association) all require the serial comma. In short, the manuals that govern the sciences.
To summarize, when precision actually matters, eg, in the sciences, you must use a serial comma. When you’re writing a newspaper and it doesn’t matter because no one reads you and you don’t care about precision or consistency—okay, sorry, give me like two minutes to recalibrate my sarcasm.
I’m back! The common arguments against using the serial comma consistently are:
Using extraneous punctuation looks cluttered.
In rare instances the serial comma can create, rather than eliminate, ambiguity.
Regarding the first, I can only say that I don’t see how using punctuation inconsistently is somehow better than using an extra comma once in a while and cluttering up your clean, beautiful page. Why use punctuation at all? Isn’t all punctuation just arbitrary symbols cluttering up our pages? It’s challenging to argue with someone whose argument is “I just don’t like how it looks,” so I shan’t. Neither would I argue about whether green “looks better” than purple. (Purple obviously looks better.)
Regarding the second, it’s true that there is a rare and specific instance where the serial comma can create ambiguity: The particular case of a series of three items masquerading as an item, and then an appositive phrase, and then a second item. For example:
I’d like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.
In this case, “Ayn Rand” may be interpreted as an item in the series or as an appositive clause describing “my mother”: “I’d like to thank my mother, who happens to be Ayn Rand, and then also God.” In this case, juggling the items in the list can solve the issue: “I’d like to thank God, my mother, and Ayn Rand.”
However, if you’ve ever asked an author to move around some items in a list then you know that authors care an awful lot about the order of list items they decided on in the first place and suggesting that, for instance, God be placed higher up on the author’s dedication list when they deliberately selected their mother for that honor will net you one (1) outraged email that you do not have time to deal with.
I posit that it is better to mandate consistent use of the serial comma and then conscientiously omit it in the very rare instance when it causes ambiguity (and a more elegant solution is not readily available) than it is to mandate inconsistent use of the serial comma. A style manual exists in part to create consistency among a set of documents. I find it difficult to understand why enforcing inconsistency is appealing to anyone who uses a style manual. There are so few comma rules you must adhere to as it is. The serial comma is elegant and sophisticated. It is the comma for distinguished grammarians.
I have been doing this type of work for about two decades and in that time I have mostly used style manuals that mandate the use of the serial comma (MLA, CMS, APA, AMA). In all that time spent editing manuscripts and reviewing the work of other editors I have never—not one single time—found an instance where a serial comma created—rather than resolved—ambiguity. Yes, it can theoretically happen. In practice, you’re unlikely to see it and if you do there are ample solutions for dealing with the ambiguity that don’t require throwing the entire concept of the serial comma out the window.
Listen, commas are free. You don’t have to pay extra for the serial comma. It’s included in your word processing software. Don’t be pre-haunting Scrooge with your commas. Be post-haunting Scrooge. Give everyone a Christmas goose. In this metaphor the goose is a comma. A Christmas comma. Or a paid holiday, I don’t know, whatever that guy was handing out at the end after he got scared into socialism.
Hey! It was short after all.
I’ll be back on Thursday with some thoughts on sensitivity reading. Never heard of a sensitivity read? Don’t know what they’re for or why you’d ever need one? Don’t worry, Shelf Life has you covered. Everything you could possibly want to know about sensitivity reading, and then probably some more. Subscribe so you don’t miss out!
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