Is that a tall, dark, and handsome man standing over there? Or a tall, dark and handsome man? Both uses of the comma are correct, but the British Department for Education apparently doesn’t realise it and wrongly penalises children in exams for using the “Oxford comma”. Any child writing “tall, dark, and handsome” is thus marked incorrect.
The debate over whether to put a comma before the “and” in a list has been around since the 18th century. In the 19th century publishing houses decided to decide on the matter, but made different decisions.
Oxford University Press decided it should be in, and in such cases it is now called the Oxford, or serial, comma. They reasoned that each adjective before the noun was of equal importance, so should all have a comma. Cambridge University Press, however, decided it should be left out. Both examples of usage are correct. (Adapted from The Guardian, May 2016, reporting on comments made by David Crystal, a linguistics expert).
Please excuse a plug for my new book of rhymed verse, called “The Rueful Hippopotamus” (Available on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk). In it I include my own take on the use of commas:
The Comma.
I’d like to take a bomber
And obliterate the comma,
Whose phrase attenuation
Is the bane of punctuation.
I always use too many;
In my prose they’re ten a penny;
While lawyers, rather direly,
Have abolished them entirely.
A comma alters, meaning
Is the goal to which I’m leaning.
The comma’s like a word or tense –
Change it and you change the sense.
Omit it and you must work out
What the prose is all about.
But I am truly disconcerted
When the comma is inverted.
Use the single or the double?
Bound to get you into trouble.
To place quote marks within quotations
Can cause a war between two nations.
It’s all a little much for me.
And so I’ll let the reader pout
And grimace, and just sort it out.
I don’t think there should be a hard and fast rule for this, it should depend on which usage benefits the flow of the sentence the most. If you want to write a speech- most of which are best given in a slow and stately fashion- a comma may be beneficial. But if you want to write a short list, a comma before the and is less appropriate because there is less of a need to distinguish between each noun.