![]() ![]() When not to use the serial comma in AP Style You can watch the entire “Grammar Girl’s Beginning and Intermediate Guide to AP Style” webinar any time.īut for now, let’s tackle the weirdness of the serial comma. So what’s your opinion? Do you like including the Oxford comma or not? Let us know in the comments section, and tell us your reasons.In a recent Ragan webinar, Grammar Girl, also known as Mignon Fogarty of the Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast Network, shared tips for some of the quirkier parts of AP Style, including that tricky serial comma. And both sides tend to get pretty passionate about it. Is it better to include it? Overall, Americans tend to say yes, and the British tend to say no, but the truth is, there are arguments for logic and clarity on both sides. There are just different requirements from different authorities that you heed in different situations. If you’re writing for school in the United States, MLA is usually standard unless your teacher says otherwise. ![]() #SERIAL COMMA MANUAL#You’re required to leave it in if you use the Chicago Manual of Style, like most publishers, or the MLA Handbook, like most academic disciplines. In America, you’re required to leave it out if you use the AP Stylebook, like most newspapers. Most of these stylebooks are exactly the same except for a few small details, and one of those details is the Oxford comma. We still have stylebooks like Hart’s today, and for publishing writers, they’re usually the final authority on grammar. Ask most other English presses at the time, and the answer would be no. If you were working for Oxford University Press in 1905, you would ask Horace Hart, and the answer would be yes. Do we really need to use it? Well, it depends who you ask. The prestige of the press and the public availability of the guide made it very influential, and that is, of course, why we call it the Oxford comma today. The big shift in this thinking came in 1905, when a printer named Horace Hart updated his style guide for Oxford University Press, requiring his employees to use a comma before the last item in a series. That’s why America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence reads, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”-no a comma after “Liberty.” That was the traditional thinking, and so the final comma was traditionally left out. And if we state the conjunction, we don’t need a comma there to take its place. But before the last item in the list, we usually state the conjunction. Well, when we use serial commas, they just take the place of the conjunctions. And, and, and: that’s the other common conjunction in lists. It signals and completes and clarifies the construction. Or, or, or: that’s one conjunction commonly used with lists. That’s true whether the items are nouns or verbs or adjectives or anything else. The actual rule is that when we have a list of items, we always need a conjunction between them-a connecting word. We call those serial commas, and many people have been taught the last one is optional. ![]() Most people know that when you have a list, or series, the convention is to separate each item with a comma. And if I had written down that last sentence, I might have used one. It goes by many names: the Oxford comma, the Harvard comma, or the final serial comma.
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