I’d like to take a bomber
And drop bombs upon the comma,
Whose phrase attenuation
Is the bane of punctuation.
I always use too many;
In my prose they’re ten a penny,
While a lawyer, rather direly,
Has 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.
The semi-colon is a snare:
How to use it, when and where?
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.
( Written by me in 2005. Plus ca change…..)
A friend of mine once suggested that I buy a Comma Magnet to draw all the unnecessary (so he said) curly things out of my writing.
What’s your position on the Oxford comma?
The ‘Oxford comma’ is an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list:
We sell books, videos, and magazines.
It’s known as the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press. Not all writers and publishers use it, but it can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words:
These items are available in black and white, red and yellow, and blue and green.
So are the items mixtures of colours (red and yellow sounding like orange) or are they discrete, individual colours.
I thus come down on the side of the Oxford comma, not just because Oxford University and its Press are exceptional (why should Americans be the only people to consider themselves thus?), but because the Oxford comma provides clarification.
We agree and for the most most exceptional reason: “[T]he Oxford comma provides clarification.”