comma roundtable

punctuation is my life :)

(if only i'd done a chapter on emoticons. mind, it was 1996.)

thank heaven for appositives!

Woo-hoo! I love the serial comma. That's what I was taught, and fortunately it's been the style at both editing jobs I've had. My understanding is that dropping the comma was a journalistic invention and had no idea until recently that so many people were taught in school not to use the serial comma. To me, serial is the default.

inevitable, i, think.

The British play really fast and loose with their commas. I don't know what they're doing over there. Particularly with double-descriptions. Fine to say "my first book, Autobiography I, sold very well." Brits have weird habits of writing "my first book, Autobiography I sold very well." (That's grammatical but means something different.) Fine to say "I turned the corner and ran into the rock critic David Raposa." Brits have weird habits of writing "I turned the corner and ran into the rock critic, David Raposa." (That's grammatical but implies that David Raposa is the only rock critic available to run into.)

To my mind this takes too much time checking its watch and making sure it's not stepping in any puddles. It's like the speaker isn't in the moment.

"I wanted to catch the pig, but as I quickly realized, he was too greasy."

More exciting! Yet incorrect. This is what I said was "AP style," yet[,] you've convinced me it's not, actually, and my QA (editor) was -- shocka -- full of it.

or

"I wanted to catch the pig, but quickly realized he was too greasy."

or

"I wanted to catch the pig, but he was too greasy, as I quickly realized."

or (fastest of all)

"I wanted to catch the pig but he was too greasy, as I quickly realized."

(which leads me to suggest that you can also drop the comma after "pig" in i. and ii.: to suggest the general greasy slippery speed of the whole event)

For just $2.50 a week, you'll have access to The New York Times Magazine, daily feature sections like Thursday Styles and Science Times and much more.

Is Science Times a "daily feature section?" Or does it belong to a final list item, "Science Times and much more?" Common sense tells us it's the former, but a serial comma could verify that much more efficiently.

vs

For just $2.50 a week, you'll have access to The New York Times Magazine, daily feature sections like Thursday Styles and Science Times and Much More.

Seriously, if you want to test common sense, try this:

For just $2.50 a week, you'll have access to The New York Times Magazine, daily feature sections like Thursday Styles and Science Times and Science Quarterly.

Common sense could now indicate either reading.

To be eligible for enrollment, you MUST submit copies of this application to your professor, teaching assistant and advisor or dean.

Print that sentence and you'll spend all day on the phone clarifying it. The beauty of the serial comma is that it allows you, with one little mark, to specify which you mean:

(a) professor, teaching assistant and advisor, or dean
(b) professor, teaching assistant, and advisor or dean

i quote, from the associated press stylebook 2005:

"Put a comma before the concluding conjunction in a series, however, if an integral element of the series requires a conjunction: I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast.

Use a comma also before the concluding conjunction in a complex series of phrases: The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper mental attitude."

so i don't think this is really a problem, at least if you're following ap style.

meanwhile, if you wanna see real problems with consistency, check out ap's all-over-the-map rules for transliterating foreign names. my favorite is the rule that south korean names be treated like so: Roh Moo-hyun, but north korean names like so: Kim Il Sung. why? i have no idea. i'm assuming that in korean it's all the same. unless kim passed some edict about naming conventions.

Hold on, I understand the concern here over the inept writing, and I think whoever was responsible needs more help and redirection than any kind of serial comma is up to; but how are we not concerned about the statement that one of their DAILY sections is called 'Thursday Styles'? Doesn't that look a bit stupid and erroneous most days of the week?

(ie daily = noun-adj rather than adj-adj)

i do not condone this product or service

Here's a good example of why a no-serial-comma rule fails (from TIME magazine):

He knows everything there is to know about weapons and is a stickler for the byzantine rules of gun ownership--the waiting periods, the background checks, the ATF callbacks and information requests.

That last bit: is it "the ATF callbacks and information requests" (where both callbacks and information requests are from the ATF) or is it "the ATF callbacks, and information requests" (where information requests has nothing to do with the ATF and is the fourth item in the sequence)? I'm assuming it's the former because the latter would require a parallel "the" -- but I would forgive someone for being confused here.

As best I can figure, that example is either incorrect or poorly phrased.

But see:

To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.

If it's a no-serial-comma example, there should be a "the". If not, the "and" is incorrectly placed. That's my thinking, at least.

Also, I think it's poor style to end a sentence with a "--"-interjection.

He knows everything there is to know about weapons and is a stickler for the byzantine rules of gun ownership--the ATF callbacks and information requests, the waiting periods and the background checks.

I always use "--" only to insert a sentence or a sentence fragment in the midst of another sentence. A simple enumerated list like that ought follow a colon, at least according to the style rules I just made up now.

oh!

To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.

"And" six times in a row

Advocates of no serial commas are fine with all sorts of confusion and misunderstanding so long as nobody thinks they're descended from Ayn Rand

Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online. We’ve studied this for over a year, in many settings, and over and over we find the same thing: the most expensive employees, especially technical people such as programmers, can be provoked by the smallest error to post a comment of their own correcting the error and chastising the original poster. Observing technical staff in one organization we found that just two common errors — it’s instead of its and there instead of their — accounted for six hours of essentially wasted time per month per employee.

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=68

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/serialcomma.html

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/AnArgumentfortheOxfordComma.jpg

lol

hahahaha

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/merlehaggardgotaround.jpg

lololol

Personally I think the serial comma is totes important, I don't know why everyone is so hot to modernize and minimize it away. Big fan here.

Yeah, will stan for the serial comma 4eva.

That cutline is killing me, so classic. Is that from Rolling Stone?

i don't know!

I LOVE teaching about the serial comma. It's the highlight of the second 8 weeks imo.

That Haggard thing is great! I always tell my middle-school students that they need to put a comma before the final "and" or "or" in a series, but sometimes I find myself stuck for an example of the ambiguity that's created if you don't. The Haggard is a perfect example.

In Spanish, however, you don't, so when grading papers of students for whom English is a second language mistakes come up often.

(No insult to advocates of gay marriage intended.)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cDjCM9JUOmk/TnXmhcZ8L6I/AAAAAAABJKI/GaF2g8wk1Vg/s1600/OxfordComma.jpg

,,,,, chameleon

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/09/10/oxford_comma_in_band_names_trios_from_peter_paul_and_mary_to_crosby_stills.html

They missed Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, which for the longest time I thought was a quartet rather than a trio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_3QqzI23sE

I've been an editor for 20 years, but the lack of comma before "then" in this supposedly correct sentence looks weird to me:

"He stayed up all night then took a nap the next day."

I would write "He stayed up all night and took a nap the next day" or "He stayed up all night and then took a nap the next day." But it doesn't feel like you can use "then" by itself in that context without punctuation.

i know what CMOS agrees with you, but i guess it would depend on whatever style guidelines you're meant to be working with?

*know that

I'm no great respecter of style guides, but I happily use the serial comma. Where I most disagree with modernity is the traditional use of the comma to indicate a slight pause. his use of commas to mark pauses traces back to a time when reading silently to oneself was uncommon.

I endorse that use and I employ it as often as I think necessary, because I think prose rhythm should be anchored firmly in speech rhythms, as if the reader were speaking my sentences aloud to a listener. I think it aids both comprehension and the pleasure derived when reading text.

This use doesn't suit the writers of style guides because there is no hard and fast rule they can enunciate. Each writer must be their own judge of where a slight pause is apt. It leads to (gasp) non-conformity.

actually sort of agree with that! in my reading the great prose stylists are all somewhat inconsistent in that regard

I endorse that use and I employ it as often as I think necessary, because I think prose rhythm should be anchored firmly in speech rhythms, as if the reader were speaking my sentences aloud to a listener. I think it aids both comprehension and the pleasure derived when reading text.

I agree with this 100%, and read my sentences aloud when they don't seem right. Then I tweak them until they have the flow that is my music. And yeah, sometimes that means a series of pauses, and other times it means letting it go so long that you're out of breath at the end.