Demise of the serial comma

The serial comma — we’ve taken it for granted for years. But now it is being downgraded as an essential part of sentence structure, and the world of English-language writing is heavily divided. 

It begins with the latest update of the venerable University of Oxford Writing and Style Guide.

Anoynmous Editor tweets: “Oxford Style Guide ditches the Oxford comma. I have strong feelings about this, none of them good.”

Publishing industry-based blog site GalleyCat gives its take, which prompts a flurry of views, for and against.

Linda Holmes, in her Monkey See blog, rails against this sad loss to syntactic convention, with a punctuation-laden posting entitled ‘Going, Going, and Gone?: No, the Oxford Comma Is Safe ... For Now’ 

William (‘Doublespeak’) Lutz, American linguist and plain-language campaigner, in a posting to the Plain Language Association INternational (PLAIN) forum entitled 'Don't kill the Oxford comma!', pleads for the serial comma to be retained.

Neil James, head of the Sydney-based Plain English Foundation, reckons North Americans are out of step.

Howard Warner, of New Zealand’s Plain English People, explains why this punctuation usage is mostly redundant.

Debra Huron, from Canada, likes it and uses it consistently.

Australian Ros Byrne, of Words That Work, both agrees and disagrees.

And Deborah Bosley, Associate Professor in English at UNCC and head of the Plain English Group, recalls a rock group who recorded a song called ‘The Oxford Comma’.

4 July 2011