Life, Writing, Weirdness

This is probably going to be a short post and it probably should qualify under the series of things that annoy me in writing.

But, as the title says, The Oxford comma should be mandatory.

What is the Oxford comma? It’s the apparently optional comma. That is the last thing. in a list of items before and or or.

I think it’s considered optional in Canadian English as a result of the heavy influence of American English which seems to want to omit it as much as possible. So many differences in American English that keep trying to work their way across the border seem to be because early newspaper printers in the U.S. wanted to save just a little bit of ink so they could make just a little bit more profit on each paper. The really big example of this is usually given as dropping various U’s from words like colour or neighbour, but I think the Oxford Comma probably fits into the same category.

But the Oxford comma should not be optional. It should be mandatory. Yes, there are many instances where it doesn’t make a difference at all, but that’s not even remotely universal. If there is any tiny possibility of the improvement of clarity in the sentence, it should be used. Period. Which means that it should be used as a general rule. There are far too many exceptions to far too many of the rules of English grammar to already.

And using the Oxford comma will not ever make things less clear, and it’s easy to come up with simple, straightforward cases where adding it improves clarity. Here are two:

At my grandfather’s funeral there were two strippers, his wife and his sister.

I have pictures in my office of my parents, Geddy Lee and Shaquille O’neal.

Yes, you can argue that these are both silly sentences, that you could write them differently to remove any ambiguity, but the point I’d probably make to that is that most people won’t. Some folks may not even realize that I’ve implied my grandmother and great aunt were strippers (which would have been fine so long as they weren’t being exploited and that would seem unlikely based on what I know) in the first case or that I think my parents are Geddy Lee and Shaquille O’neal in the second. But many will.

Maybe we should only use it when it’s necessary to make things perfectly clear? Well, my counter argument to that would be that the writer doesn’t always know when it’s necessary to add that little bit of extra clarity for the reader. If you’re turning some piece of written work loose into the wild, you have no control over the audience who finds it, so you don’t know who needs the Oxford comma to be there to make things clear. Better to default to no chance of mistaken meaning. Even if it’s only one person in 100 or 1000, it shouldn’t matter. Why even momentarily confuse that one person? Do it enough times that they won’t bother to find other things you’ve written.

So yes, it seems like a very small thing to be picky over, but most large things are made-up of small things. The Oxford comma is a small step toward better, clearer writing.

Be well, everyone.