One of the mixed race South African yachtsmen described in the New York Times article I discussed in the post immediately below
hung with gangs and watched men die on the streets. When he was 8 a classmate stabbed him. When he was 14 he was arrested for beating a high-school teacher.
Today, 19-year-old Marcello Burricks helps trim the mainsail on a 25meter racing yacht in this city’s stunning Table Bay. The only people he wants to beat are Larry Ellison, Ernesto Bertarelli and a host of other billionaires in the next America’s Cup.
I mention this here not to bring attention to the criminal conditions Mr. Burricks overcame but to the New York Times‘s current, continuing, and grammatically criminal offense of refusing to use the serial comma.
In Chapter One of their indispensable little book, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, Strunk and White thought the serial comma so important that it was Rule No. 2 of their “elementary rules of usage,” stated in their customary succinct style:
In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.
The virtual uniformity of respected authorities on this matter is discussed here, and here is a good, short summary of the whys and wherefores of the rule.
When you are writing about a series of things, the serial comma is necessary before the final “and”: I’m bringing favors, gifts, cake, and ice cream to the party. Newspapers are the worst offenders in the serial comma department; back in the mists of prehistory (meaning about forty years ago), leaving off that final comma saved a tiny bit of space, work, and resources (those little lead slugs they used to use), and every bit of saving is a good bit of savings, newspapermen figured. However, leaving out that last comma FREQUENTLY leads to confusion; you’ll frequently see idiocies in the newspaper like Bids were submitted by John Brown, Jane Smith, Laird, Vickers and Harland and Wolff or The smoothness of the satin, the silky texture of the mink and the rugged burlap. Only one exception is allowable: many businesses don’t bother with the last comma (as in the law firm Dewey, Cheatem & Howe). Call that business whatever its founders want(ed) it to be called.
The New York Times, of course, is a newspaper, and thus violates this rule every day of the week, and many times on Sundays. If this were a simple matter of ignoring some fuddy-duddy schoolmarmish rule, then it would be no big deal. But on the contrary, a good argument can be made that the fate of civilization as we know it rests of honoring rules just like this one. As no less (or more) an authority than I myself once observed,
Some people approach rules, principles, propositions the same way they approach punctuation: they grab a handful of commas, for example, and throw them at the page, perhaps arranging them a bit afterward in an artful pattern. Others see punctuation exclusively as an aid to clarity, and if clarity is assured they believe proper punctuation really isn’t very important. Still others think grammatical rules are sacrosanct even where clarity is not an issue. They are likely to attribute the decline of western civilization to the increasing tendency to ignore the serial comma rule. That’s the rule that says in a series of three or more items — a, b, and c — the “and” must be preceded by a comma. (This theory has the added virtue of laying a good deal of blame for our problems at the feet of newspapers, whose narrow columns led editors to drop the serial comma to save space.)
“Sacrosanct” may be a bit strong, but I’m definitely on the “pretty damn important” side of this issue. Examples of the dire consequences of omitting the serial comma abound, such as the famous (or is it apocryphal) book dedication: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Wilson Follett, author of the masterful MODERN AMERICAN USAGE, was fond of pointing out that the serial comma was frequently essential in order to know how many items are in the series.
Consider his example,
In the following year he will specialize in gynecology, immunology, orthopedics or diseases of the bone.
How many items are in this series, three or four? Follett says the correct answer (and it was his example) is four, which the serial comma would have made clear. Or another (with Follett’s “Three” changed to “The” in response to Michelle’s astute observation in a comment below):
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
Was extending foreign aid an imperative? Only the serial comma can tell. Not to mention (well, O.K., I’m mentioning it) those pesky series where some or all of the items in it comprise more than one item (you get a good example of the correct usage of “comprise” here for free):
You could tell who was from which school by the colors of their uniforms: orange and blue, red and black, purple and gold and green and red and blue.
Without the serial comma, there would be no way to tell.
In examples such as the one immediately above, and also for series where the items contain internal punctuation, semi-colons are used to separate the items. Consider this example :
The medal winners were Tom, Gold; Dick, Silver; and Harry, Bronze.
It is interesting, I think, that no one, so far as I know, has a rule against the serial comma. Those organizations, such as newspapers, that routinely omit it recognize that often (as in the above examples) clarity requires its use, and so their “rule” is something like, “Don’t use it … unless you need to.” This, of course, is no rule at all, rather like “Speed Limit: 65 (unless you think it safe to go faster).”
True, THE NEW YORK TIMES MANUAL OF STYLE AND USAGE almost has a rule, but it is one of the oddest I’ve seen (quoted here):
In general, do not use a comma before and in a series unless the other elements of the series are separated by semicolons.
Note well that “In general.” What that means is, if you can’t tell what’s in the series without the serial comma, use it.
The only explanation for this quite weird rule that I can think of is a desire for a strange kind of symmetry: since the NYT drops the final comma in a series (the one before the conjunction), it appears to feel a need to demote what should be a final semicolon in a series to a comma. An example from the yachting article:
They raced off Mozambique; from Cape Town to Rio; in Newport, R.I., and elsewhere.
When “rules” are vague they are often ignored or misapplied, and on any given day the NYT is full of examples proving this observation. Here’s one, from another article in Tuesday’s paper, ignoring the senseless rule to change the final semicolon to a comma in a series:
For the Clinton administration, the deadly details involved the method of getting to universal coverage: the requirement that employers provide insurance; the creation of quasi-governmental structures to administer the system; and the changes it would impose on Americans, even those who were perfectly happy with their medical care as it was.
Most of the time the NYT omits serial commas even when the items in the series are longer terms or phrases. Thus from another Tuesday article (p. A16 in my hard copy):
The new federal office would coordinate research into new detection technologies, improve training on how to use them and help decide where to place them, administration officials said….
The program would include representatives from the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department and the Department of Defense. [No comma before and in either sentence]
But then, two pages later:
The designers of women’s clothes receive most of the attention, yet it is squandered on third-rate talents, clichés of femininity, and actresses frightened into submission by silly television frock pundits. [Serial comma before and]
And then there’s the impressive columnist, David Brooks, from his Tuesday column:
Chambers broke with the Communist Party in 1938, testified against Alger Hiss in 1948, and then emerged as a melancholy but profound champion of freedom. [Serial comma before and]
Brooks is such a good and careful writer that I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t insist on having protection for his use of the serial comma included in his contract.
O.K., I’m sure some of you are asking, what does the serial comma have to do with discrimination? I could be cute and say it reflects discriminating taste, but I won’t. I could say that the anarchy of the NYT’s punctuation reveals what happens when “rules” are so flexible they aren’t rules at all, or if they are they are too confusing to apply consistently, and that, though a bit overblown, would be getting closer to what one’s attitude toward the serial comma reveals about other (some would say more important) issues.
Many, perhaps most, critics of rules (or “strict rules,” if you prefer) misunderstand them. They see them as the command of Orthodoxy, or at least Authority, and hence believe that freedom demands defiance. They see them as Absolutes, and hence out of time and place in our modern (or, worse, postmodern) pragmatic, relativistic culture. What these critics of rules (and, in fact, of formalism in general) miss is the fact that one of the strongest rationales for having them is, perhaps ironically, purely pragmatic and instrumental: they increase efficiency.
Using the serial comma can never cause confusion. Omitting it, as we have seen, often can. Thus if your “rule” is to omit it, you have to stop and consider whether every series you write is clear. The serial comma rule takes that decision off the table; if you use it for every series, you don’t have to consider the clarity question on every one of them. Grammatical rules, in short, are very much like principles: the stronger they are, the more pauses and potential confusions they take off the table.
So, show me someone who generally (but, of course, not always) omits the serial comma, and there’s a good chance I can show you someone who also believes in a “living” Constitution whose meaning, if it has one, is whatever the latest judge says.
UPDATE [7 Feb.]
First, I would like to make a point here that I made so far down in the comments below that you may not have seen (I’m not sure I would wish sinking that far on anyone.) Most of the defenses of grammatical rules emphasize their contribution to clarity, which is a benefit to readers, but rules also provide an enormous benefit to writers. Like a constitution, they take some matters off the table and eliminate the necessity of many decisions that would otherwise have to be made. Writers who favor the rule-less, ad hoc approach to serial commas — that is, who use a serial comma only when they think it is needed for clarity — must pause every time they write a sentence that includes a series and decide whether it is clear without the serial comma. Those of us who adhere to the rule, however, never need to suffer such thought- and flow-interrupting pauses. We’ve already decided: if it’s a series, use the comma. (Similarly, those of us who believe the Constitution and civil rights laws bar, or should bar, discrimination on the basis of race never have to decide if this or that example of racial discrimination is justified.)
There’s another, and unsung, benefit of following the serial comma rule: doing so can signal when several items really are NOT a series. Consider this sentence: Kerry’s campaign was disastrous, disorganized and ultimately self-defeating. If you were confident the writer adheres to the serial comma rule, you will know that he is asserting that Kerry’s campaign was one thing, disastrous, not three things — a) disastrous, b) disorganized, and c) self-defeating. This sentence really means, Kerry’s campaign was disastrous, by which I mean disorganized and self-defeating, or perhaps better: Kerry’s campaign was disastrous — disorganized and self-defeating. This dog-that-didn’t-bark distinction is not available to the writer who does not use the serial comma … except when he does.
Finally, I did not mean to imply that the New York Times is alone in demonstrating the punctuation anarchy produced by disdaining the serial comma rule. Most newspapers are equally guilty, if not equally influential. And, as luck would have it, in his column today the Washington Post‘s media critic, Howard Kurtz, demonstrated this confusion in spades in the space of one paragraph:
[1] The commentariat is increasingly populated by political refugees. [2] From Bush 41’s White House and campaign, Tony Snow joined Fox, Mary Matalin went to CNN and Bill Kristol, who happily advises the current administration, launched the Weekly Standard. [3] From the Hill, Newt Gingrich became a Fox commentator, his spokesman Tony Blankley took over the Washington Times editorial page, and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough became an MSNBC talk show host. [4] From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC’s “This Week,” Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Vanity Fair, and Carville and Begala joined CNN.
I promise: that paragraph really is there. I didn’t make it up. In fact, I couldn’t have made up one so perfect. (I’ve added the bolded, bracketed numbers to make commenting easier.)
1. This one doesn’t count since there is no series.
2. No serial comma, which should appear after “CNN.”
3. Same structure as No. 2, except there is a serial comma (after “editorial page”).
4. This one is fabulous! First, there is a serial comma (after “Vanity Fair”).
WaPo, it appears, is like the NYT: it omits the serial comma … except when it doesn’t.
Now look at No. 4 without the serial comma: From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC’s “This Week,” Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Vanity Fair and Carville and Begala joined CNN. First, you have to pause to realize that Dee Dee didn’t really sign with NBC and Vanity Fair and Carville. You can do that only because you know that “Carville” is a person and not a magazine about town cars, but you can’t be sure that everyone will know that. Moreover, what if you weren’t so well-informed, and the sentence were the following: From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC’s “This Week,” Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Forbes and Begala joined CNN? Does this construction say that Dee Dee signed with NBC and Forbes and Begala joined CNN, or did Forbes (no, not the Republican Forbes) and Begala join CNN? No way to know from this sentence.
Rules, in short, are Good not because they are the Voice of Authority but because they make sense.
This Post Is Dedicated To My Parents, Ayn Rand…
Discriminations has a very interesting piece on the use of the “serial” comma. What they take a look at is the…
Where’s the Dunce Cap?
Bad grammar at the New York Times. It is a fact: liberals have poor grammar and conservatives good. I will formally postulate this theory at some undetermined time in the future. But it’s true, trust me….
John, I agree with you absolutely, but one of your examples above has a loophole in it. In the sensce beginning “Three Presidential ‘imperatives’,” you can deduce that “foreign aid” is its own item from the “Three” at the beginning of the sentence. The only other way to read it makes “extension of reciprocal aid and foreign aid” one noun phrase.
I like the team uniforms example very much, though — a classic case.
I once worked on the copy-editing of a book by my doctoral advisor — not editing, you understand, just getting the text from the typewritten originals into a word-processing program, and then entering the copy editor’s alterations. The publisher insisted on the serial comma, and my professor was one of those who dislike it strongly except where necessary for clarity. I must have inserted thousands of the puppies. Only once did he put his foot down and wring a concession out of the publisher, and that was in the title, which is the serial-comma-free Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780.
Lynne Truss has a good, non-dogmatic discussion of the serial comma (which in England is for some reason known as the “Oxford Comma”) in her wonderful recent Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
I was in fact taught in journalism graduate school (yeah, that was really useful) that, in the news business, the serial comma is not to be used. While I “get” why the tradition might get your hackles up, and as a non-news writer I might occasionally be inclined to agree, I have to say, you shouldn’t blame the NYT, no matter how much of a grudge you have against them. It’s an industry-wide policy, to my knowledge.
Michelle – Thanks. And VERY good point about the presidential imperatives. Thank goodness that was Follett’s example and not my own, but I’ve now exercised my editorial prerogative to change (with a note that I’m doing so) his “Three” to “The.”
Um, John, I’m afraid your revised version doesn’t work either:
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
You can’t read that as a “list” of only two items without the sentence being ungrammatical. It would have to be
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization and extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
Without the “and,” you’re constrained to read it as a list, mentally inserting the comma before “and foreign aid.”
OK, let’s try adding an item:
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, [increasing international coordination on security matters,] extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
But no, that doesn’t do it, either, because the serial-comma-free version would have to be
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, [increasing international coordination on security matters] and extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
to be grammatical. Try it without the “and” and without the implied serial comma, and see what results if you try to interpret the list as having three items in it:
[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, [increasing international coordination on security matters,] extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.
In other words:
The imperatives were A, B, C.
Acceptable as snappy journalese, maybe, but I think most people, whatever their feelings about the serial comma, would want to insert an “and”:
The imperatives were A, B[,] [and] C.
Follett’s med-student example is vulnerable to the same criticsm, now that I think of it. Surely “[H]e will specialize in A, B, C[.]” looks weird on the face of it; surely you’d expect either “A, B, or C” or else “A, B or C,” depending on your views on serial commas. But “A, B, C” is how you’d have to parse it for there to be an ambiguity at all.
Jeez, I’m dissing Follett in public! What’s wrong with me?
When my kid was in middle school she blurted out to me one day, “Commas: you get ’em or you don’t.” I know what she meant. Lots and lots of people haven’t risen to the level of worrying about serial commas because they’re still generating run-on sentences. She used to take handouts from school office personnel and sometimes teachers and mark them up for grammar, spelling, and punctutation problems. Of course she didn’t do anything with them.
Hey, Cobra, let’s go grab a beer while John, Michelle and Laura work this one out, eh?
If you like sticking to unamibuous rules, you should avoid traveling to Holland.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html
These types of intersections are apparently growing.
Gee, notherbob2, aren’t you having fun here? ;-)
Grammatical nitpickery is the ultimate spectator sport, you know. Here, just watch:
And then there’s the impressive columnist, David Brooks, from his Tuesday column:
That’s from the post above. But, see, I think what John meant to write was
And then there’s the impressive columnist David Brooks, from his Tuesday column:
The comma after “columnist” in the first version implies that there’s only one “impressive columnist,” and David Brooks is he. Compare
The conductor, Joe Maestro, then made some brief remarks
vs.
The conductor Joe Maestro then made some brief remarks.
In the first instance, I am to assume that Joe Maestro has just conducted or is just about to conduct something, or at least is associated with some performance that is being discussed. In the second instance, Joe Maestro is being identified as a conductor, nothing more.
Arcane enough for ya, notherbob2? I fear that shortly John and I will be off on “Sentence Adverbs: Friend or Foe?” and “Data/Media/Bacteria: A Singular Plurality.” Stand back.
As a lyricist and occasional attempter of poetry, choosing meter and rhyme-scheme in context of various verse formats, my sense is that clarity demands disciplined expression, and vice versa. The word “discipline” connotes a “disk”, or circle, within which agreed rules apply– think “disciple”, as one who serves and guides inside a “circle of discipline”.
Strangely, such concepts lead to mysticism and magic, for circles historically provide refuge from “chaos and dark night”. The idea of a “spell”, inherently semiotic, is to NAME something, and thereby acquire power over it. Cadmus sowed the seeds of discourse that then sprang up as warriors, full-armed… what say you, that these “seeds” are not the letters of the Alphabet? Cadmus’ myth is that of language itself, not always clear, but dangerous. Beware its purposeful misuse, which entails “literally” demonic consequences.
Remember John Donne’s “A Grammarion’s Funeral”, celebrating tongue-in-cheek a 17th Century scholar of Greek “who gave us the doctrine of the ‘enclitic de'”? Treated as a figure of fun, awash in triviality (from “trivium”, itself of interesting origin), I believe this man served Cadmus’ cause by filigreeing humankind’s blueprint for communication.
Is the “serial comma” rule necessary? Yes!– but in no wise sufficient. Beyond clarity lies honest, rational discourse. Grammarians are not grasping at straws, clinging to pedantic trivia; they are adepts of language, Masters of Mighty Spells that “summon spirits from the vasty deep”. “But will they come?” asks Prospero. Ah, SOMETHING will: We see it all around us (Yeats’ “rough beast”, and more). Keep going… “DISCrimination” ties in very nicely here.
Notherbob writes:
>>>Hey, Cobra, let’s go grab a beer while John, Michelle and Laura work this one out, eh?”
You ain’t lying, partner. I think I’ll ride this one out.
–Cobra
Cobra,
You ain’t lying, partner. I think I’ll ride this one out.
Oh, stick around. You might learn something ;-)
IT WAS A JOKE, my friend. If you’d spent a late night (shall we say) rectifying a fellow writer’s prose, pre-publication, with special attention to the Comma Dep’t, you might empathize.
Michelle – Very good points! However…
Re your deconstruction of Follett’s (thank goodness!) example: I think your standard of grammatical/ungrammatical is too blunt an instrument. Many of confusions caused or cured by serial commas or their absence (and similar niceties) don’t rise (or sink) to that level. When you say that [The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid can’t be read “as a ‘list’ of only two items without the sentence being ungrammatical,” I think you overshoot the mark (to mix my instrument metaphors). First, I’m not sure that the sentence is actually ungrammatical if it refers to only two items. It is certainly awkward; the missing and between the two items is sorely missed, but I think its absence stops short of leaving the sentence ungrammatical.
Ditto with your adding another item to the mix. Everything you say about this version is true … except that what you’re demonstrating (very well, I might add) is that these examples are confusing, that they lack clarity, not that they violate any grammatical rule. If a reader stops to think about the sentences as you construct and reconstruct them, he or she would probably reach your same conclusions. But few enough writers, much less readers, do stop and think. For readers not to be misled by the versions you criticize, in short, they would have to stop and think about them. The virtue of things like the serial comma rule is that they prevent that sort of confusion from arising; when followed, they lead to sentences that readers don’t have to figure out.
Now re “the impressive columnist, David Brooks, …,” I suspect (though we all know an author is not necessarily the best interpreter of his own work) that is what I meant. He is, after all, the only impressive columnist at the New York Times. But let’s look at your examples:
The conductor, Joe Maestro, then made some brief remarks
vs.
The conductor Joe Maestro then made some brief remarks.
“In the first instance,” you write, “I am to assume that Joe Maestro has just conducted or is just about to conduct something, or at least is associated with some performance that is being discussed. In the second instance, Joe Maestro is being identified as a conductor, nothing more.”
I think you’ve actually got this one a bit wrong. In my reading, the first one clearly means, The conductor, whose name is Joe Maestro, then made some brief remarks. In short, what we have is a classic non-restrictive clause (in my modified version; an implied non-restrictive clause in yours). The absence of the implied/actual non-restrictive clause would not change the meaning of the sentence (that’s why they call them non-restrictive) since non-restrictive clauses are functionally parenthetical.
The second instance distinguishes the Joe Maestro who is a conductor from all the other Joe Maestros. That is, it was the conductor Joe Maestro who made the remarks, not the bassoonist or the janitor Joe Maestro.
Thus, My daughter Jessie is very smart indicates that I have other daughters besides Jessie (a counterfactual, since I don’t). On the other hand, My daughter, Jessie, is very smart indicates that I have only one daughter. Again, we are dealing with implicit restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, as revealed by the proper punctuation when spelled out:
My daughter whose name is Jessie is very smart. (Several daughters, restrictive clause [not parenthetical; sentence is wrong without it], no commas)
My daughter, whose name is Jessie, is very smart. (One daughter, non-restrictive clause, commas)
For what it’s worth, I taught Jessie, who is in fact very smart, about serial commas when she was around five years old. She had, and has had, no trouble with them ever since … but she still has a hard time with restrictive and non-restrictive clauses and the commas they either require or don’t.
I am probably one of those annoying grammarians who insists on following all of the rules at all times. I never did understand why people don’t always agree with me. After all, if everyone always used proper grammar and everyone knew proper grammar, people would hardly ever get confused and mistake a writer’s meaning, right? I suppose people do not want to bother learning grammar, since English grammar is so difficult and all.
The only time your meaning can be confused when you are using proper grammar is because of a misnomer. For example:
The word “livid” is usually taken to mean “orange red” or “angry.” Therefore, if you are livid you are angry and your face is red. If you are acting lividly, you are acting angrily. People also use phrases like “livid flames.” This is a problem, because “livid” actually means “the color of lead.” It can also be extended to be blackish-blue or the color of brusied flesh. Therefore, if someone has a livid wound on them, do they have a bruise or a bright red, inflamed mark?
Those using proper grammar will probably mislead those who do not know it.
I am not a linguist (not even cunning), and I hated high school English class. However, I can distinctly remember being taught NOT to use the comma to separate the last two items in a list. That’s why we have “and.” Interesting.
We have “and” for lots of reasons, AND being a substitute for a needed comma — such as the comma before a co-ordinating conjunction, as in this sentence — is not one of them.
I gotta say: who cares? The Times’ rule seems eminently sensible: their writers are, by definition, among the most skilled journalists in the world, and the decision is left up to their well-exercised discretion with that “generally” rule. Surely they can be trusted with that most minute of
This is pedantic, prescriptive and painful.
You may be interested in this:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001803.html
The error is a throwback to the old days of manual typesetting. Newspapers did any little thing they could to save space and type blocks. It persists into today out of habit more than any other reason.
The theory is that most people can figure it out.
Gosh, John, how dare you make Paul read your blog.
Ben’s post makes sense. I may be remembering all wrong, but I seem to remember that waaaay back when I was in high school, we were told that that last comma was optional. There were two schools of thought about it, and we should just do whatever looked right and made sense. I always put mine in.
Paul obviously is no prescriptivist. He no doubt likes his rules liberal, loose and non-binding.
But wait. He may resent my construction, implying as it does that “loose” and “flexible” merely explicate and flesh out the meaning of “liberal.” In my view no serial comma is needed here because “liberal, loose and non-binding” is not a series of separate items. Paul, on the other hand, would probably insist that this really is a series, i.e., that “loose” and “non-binding” are separate characteristics, not merely just a way of emphasizing what is meant by “liberal.” If so, he’d insist that he indeed does like his rules liberal, loose, and non-binding. But wait again. He can’t really do that because he thinks this is all pedantic nonsense. Oh well.
For those of you who are not prescriptivist/formalist by temperament or conviction, here is a pragmatic and instrumental argument for following all the rules your grammatical betters recommend:
If you do, you will not offend us prescriptivists, and indeed we will be more likely to recognize your brilliance and sensitivity. Meanwhile, those those who neither know nor care about grammatical niceties won’t even notice.
On the other hand, if you yourself neither know nor care about these grammatical niceties and thus omit serial commas, etc., some of your readers (perhaps the very ones you want to impress or persuade) will think less of you, or at least of your writing, as though you’d used slang without even knowing that it was slang. And you’ll gain no favor with those readers who, like you, don’t know or care about these issues because they still won’t notice.
In short, following the rules pleases some influential readers and offends none. (I’m assuming that you stop short or real pedantry, which is offensive.) Ignoring the rules offends some influential readers but gains you no compensating favors.
Hopefully you’ll do the right thing. (Yes, that was a joke. But as long as I’m here: “sentence adverbs,” i.e., this “hopefully,” offend many [but not all] careful writers because they are not really an adverbs. Thus, here the sentence adverb “Hopefully” means “I hope.” But consider the alternative: “Hopefully, you’ll do the right thing.” That’s O.K., because that “Hopefully” is not a sentence adverb. What this sentence says is that you’ll do the right thing, full of hope that your effort to be careful will be recognized and rewarded.)
OK, usually you can figue out how a particular series works, regardless of whether the serial comma is used or whether it’s left out.
The trouble is, sometimes you can’t figure it out without going back over the sentence you just finished, & that slows you down by interrupting the rhythm & pace of your reading. Writers, as a matter of common courtesy, should not subject readers to such bumps.
Even if writers take care to use the serial comma, but inconsistently & only in cases where leaving it out creates ambiguity or outright misunderstanding, then the writers are subjecting their readers to more bumps. That’s because when lists of things are punctuated different ways all in the same piece of reading material, it’s harder than it needs to be for readers to settle into a steady rhythm & pace as they progress through the sentences & paragraphs.
The only way to put lists in prose with maximum clarity and minimum bumps (that is, the only way to do so while consistently making it easy for the readers to follow) is to use the serial comma every time.
In writing stuff for people to read, the idea is not just to make it possible for folks to understand what you mean. The idea is to make it impossible to misunderstand. Plus, if you don’t take care to make your writing easy to read, easy to understand, & hard to misunderstand, too many of your readers are apt to tune out early, quit before they get to the punch line, & never catch on to what you were trying to get across. Bad writing defeats its own purpose.
Despite that, lots of people who write for money (&, worse, who edit other people’s writing for money) don’t know how to use commas & have trouble with the apostrophe.
— Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
“…have trouble with the apostrophe.”
That is a whole ‘nother bucket of worms.
Blogworthies LII
Because The Blog from the Core simply can’t cover everything. Noteworthy entries @ Power Line, Armavirumque, small dead animals, Clarity…
I think my last comment came off a bit too harsh, probably in my lust for alliteration. Sorry. (Still, I deserve a little credit for the complete dropping off sentence effect!)
I think the question is: why the unnecessary expense of energy? I think we’re in agreement that in some cases serial commas add necessary shades of meaning to a sentence. I think we’re also in agreement that in some cases they don’t. (“I am going to the store to buy flour, eggs and milk.” Is there really any ambiguity there that doesn’t require assuming the existence of genetically modified chicows?)
Given that the meaning is unaffected in many cases, who does it profit for readers to gripe about this sort of thing, and for writers to worry about this sort of thing? Alan has an interesting point, perhaps, about interrupting the “flow” of reading by inconsistent use of punctuation, but not, I think, a significant one, because my experience is that readers don’t ordinarily notice punctuation unless they’re looking for it or it’s particularly startling. “[I]t’s harder than it needs to be for readers to settle into a steady rhythm & pace as they progress through the sentences & paragraphs” is one of those assertions that needs to be supported by evidence. Preferably some kind of evidence that can’t be refuted by waving a James Joyce or David Foster Wallace book in the air, jumping up and down, and going oooh, oooh, oooh!
Actually, here’s a question for you prescriptivists in the crowd: should I have put a punctuation mark before the closing quotation mark in the penultimate sentence of the previous paragraph? And if so, why?
Anyway, my point is: erroneous grammar that doesn’t modify the meaning of a sentence is the ultimate victimless crime, and it’s a waste of time, energy[,] and care not only for me to write that way to please you, but for you to sit at your computer and fume because I didn’t — and that waste of time energy care hurts both of us. It makes me look unjustifiably uneducated, and it makes your blood pressure rise. Why?
(Bizarrely enough, I tend to automatically use the final comma anyway. So I truly don’t know why I’m using my time energy care to defend it, except that if final-comma-flexibility goes, before I know it, I’ll have a gang of prescriptivists knocking on my door at 3 in the morning to arrest me for starting incomplete sentences with “And.” First they came for the serial non-commalizers…)
And yes, Virginia, there is a living constitution.
“Hi. My name is Paul, and I’m a… I’m a… I’m a liberal constitutional constructionist!”
“Hi Paul!”
“And, and, and… I BELIEVE IN PENUMBRAL EMANATIONS!”
“What? You pervert! Get out!”
Paul, the penumbral emanationist (talk about believing strange things!), asks a couple of questions that deserve an answer.
I think the question is: why the unnecessary expense of energy? I think we’re in agreement that in some cases serial commas add necessary shades of meaning to a sentence. I think we’re also in agreement that in some cases they don’t. (“I am going to the store to buy flour, eggs and milk.” Is there really any ambiguity there…?
No, not there, but if you were going to buy flour, eggs and milk and pork and beans and cookies and cream ice cream it would be a different story, especially to anyone not familiar with pork and beans or cookies and cream ice cream.
I think what you’re missing is the instrumental beauty of rules — for the writer as much as the reader. In your ad hoc, rule-less, treating every series afresh approach, the writer must make a decision every time he or she has a sentence with a (or, God forbid, more than one) series. Do I need the serial comma? Is it clear without it? Not only does this make the writer make many more decisions than necessary instead of treating all like constructions the same, but in addition the result — some series with the serial comma, some without — advertises the fact that you don’t take punctuation, well, seriously. The absence of following a sensible rule that many people observe slows down and complicates both reading AND writing.
Actually, here’s a question for you prescriptivists in the crowd: should I have put a punctuation mark before the closing quotation mark in [this sentence: “‘[I]t’s harder than it needs to be for readers to settle into a steady rhythm & pace as they progress through the sentences & paragraphs’ is one of those assertions that needs to be supported by evidence?”
First, note that in order to present the question properly I had to use internal quotation marks (the single quote marks) around the “It’s harder…” sentence contained in Paul’s sentence. Without them, the question Paul asks would have been unintelligible.
With that housekeeping out of the way, the answer to Paul’s question is, no. Why? Because the internal, quoted sentence does not end the sentence Paul wrote.
On the other hand, given Paul’s apparent standard — use punctuation only when its absence would lead to uncertainty of meaning — it’s not clear why he begins every sentence with a capital letter: since the preceding period clearly points to the end of a sentence, you don’t really need a beginning capital to tell you where the next one begins. Nor, according to the “as long as you can figure it out” standard, would there be any reason to avoid phonetic spelling in favor of the preferred standard version. Etc.
I hitch a ride to a party with a married couple, John and Mary, in their new 2005 Thunderbird. When asked who came in the brand new car, I would answer (transcribed), “John, Mary, and me.” Without the serial comma (John, Mary and me), it appears that Mary and I are a unit or that she is married to me rather than to John.
Are the colors of our flag red, white, and blue or red, WHITE and BLUE?
Paul,
Actually, here’s a question for you prescriptivists in the crowd: should I have put a punctuation mark before the closing quotation mark in the penultimate sentence of the previous paragraph?
Of course not. Let’s see, we have
“[I]t’s harder than it needs to be for readers to settle into a steady rhythm & pace as they progress through the sentences & paragraphs” is one of those assertions that needs to be supported by evidence.
In other words,
[A] is one of those assertions that needs to be supported by evidence.
Can you imagine that sentence with punctuation after [A]? I can’t.
But, you know, Paul, this is just too funny. That sentence really takes me back. I’ll explain.
My junior year of high school, I got into a sort of tiff with my English teacher. There was a question on a quiz:
“Iceland is one of those countries that [have, has] little pollution.”
We had to choose the verb form that made the sentence grammatically correct. I said “have”; my teacher said “has.”
Well, I was sure I was right, and being anxious to prove it, I decided to write to some authority and get proof. If I’d had any sense, I’d have written to some language guru like Safire; being a young idiot with a hazy idea that a “linguist” would know all about grammar, and moreover being pretty set at that time on attending MIT, I wrote to Noam Chomsky instead.
He wrote back very courteously, explaining that I was “right” in the technical sense, and bracketing noun phrases for me:
“Iceland is [one of [those countries that have little pollution]].”
But of course he went on to explain that “good grammar” is just grammar that makes the intended meaning clear, &c.
The thing that amused me just now is that
“[A] is one of those assertions that [need, needs] to be supported by evidence[.]”
is exactly the same sort of sentence, and you did exactly what my English teacher insisted I do. I say “need,” not “needs.” YMMV, but I have a Distinguished Professor on my side. Well, sort of.
Bizarrely enough, I tend to automatically use the final comma anyway.
And you split that infinitive deliberately, didn’t you? You sly dog ;-)
Needs to be supported by evidence?
What about the evidence of your own experience?
That counts, doesn’t it?
What other evidence would you want instead?
And, more important, how would you set about looking for it?
— Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
Does anyone even learn about comma splices anymore?
Misuse of the serial comma doesn’t exactly get my Irish up, but never you fear, John Rosenberg is on the case: O.K., I’m sure some of you are asking, what does the serial comma have to do with discrimination? I…
Re the Update: Oh, man, John. I wish I had a bucket o’semicolons to go with that graf. Seriously, that’s how I would do it. I don’t like commas in series where the individual items are as long as that. It’s too easy for the reader to get lost.
So if I were editing this, I’d make it (almost automatically)
[3] From the Hill, Newt Gingrich became a Fox commentator; his spokesman Tony Blankley took over the Washington Times editorial page; and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough became an MSNBC talk show host.
Er, except I’d italicize “Washington Times,” capitalize “congressman,” and possibly hyphenate “talk show.” But you get the idea.
I really do think the semicolons help in a situation like this one. Even if there aren’t commas internal to the individual items in the list, when the items are as long as these, more emphatic punctuation seems to me to make the sentence easier to read.
I should have added that if Gingrich had had only one spokesman, it ought to be “his spokesman, Tony Blankley,” in which case the semicolons would be obligatory anyway.
I agree with both Michelle’s comments above.
John, I really don’t think anyone is reading this. Unless it’s possibly Stuart Buck.
Who, me?
“John, I really don’t think anyone is reading this. Unless it’s possibly Stuart Buck.”
I’m reading it. I’m really enjoying it, too. It’s interesting how there actually has to be some sort of argument about the serial comma (“you DON’T have to use it all the time” vs. “you SHOULD”). I figured that, after reading Mr. Rosenburg’s arguments, one would have the sense to agree.
Of course, there are some very different schools of thought being represented here. The argument isn’t really about the serial comma after all, is it? Isn’t it more about “absolutes exist and rules are good” vs. “every truth is relative and rules are bad?”
(I could write, if I were British, ” ‘…truth is relative and rules are bad’?” but I digress.)
While I tend to agree with John’s arguments, it is as well to note that “prescriptivists” have by no means all been on the same side of this issue. Most notably, Fowler recommended omission of the serial comma except where needed to avoid ambiguity. It is therefore quite inaccurate to claim that omission of the serial comma is a sign of semi-literacy.
Steve – I agree. I would never say someone is semi-literate for refusing to use the serial comma. Misguided, yes; semi-literate, no.
Michelle – But if Stuart and you are reading this, what does it matter if no one else is?
The Carnival Of Education: Week 1
We are delighted to be hosting the First Edition of The Carnival Of Education. What we have done is assemble a variety of interesting and informative posts from around the EduSphere (and a few from the Larger Sphere) that have