> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea.<p>I am more than happy to truly believe this premise (and if you read some of the things I write, and how I use punctuation, I hope the reader will agree ;P), and can come up with situations where the extra comma "breaks the rythm" and cases where it "makes the sentence".<p>> Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.<p>However, I simply can't bring myself to read this without speaking "rythm, and pattern": the sentence is expertly crafted and frankly sounds amazing; but, if I accept the author's premise that he really and truly carefully decided to not put a comma there because he didnt want me to pause, the sentence sounds horrible: in fact, this sentence sounds pretty un-lyrical to me unless I also add a pause--yes, not one but two added commas--after "pattern", at which point I would say it sounds downright <i>powerful</i>; I could, alternatively, appreciate a smaller pause between "momentum" and "syncopation", which would form a grouping that I think <i>almost</i> sounds even better? (though which I have a difficult time "performing"), but then we have to give up the first comma as well: "momentum/syncopation, rythm and pattern, are"... I really would love to hear the author read this sentence of the article out loud.
I found this in the source of the page.<p><!--
So this guy we just interviewed at my
current job wrote this little script
to see if a product update for some
company had come out. Every 10 seconds
the script urllib'ed the page, checked
the length of the html - literally
len(html) - against the length it was
last time it checked. He wrote a blog
post about this script. A freaking
blog post. He also described himself
as "something of a child prodigy"
despite, in another post, saying he
couldn't calculate the area of a slice
of pizza because "area of a triangle
with a curved edge is beyond my
Google-less math skills." Seriously
dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20
years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty
freaking obvious.<p>The script also called a ruby script
to send him a tweet which another
script was probably monitoring to text
his phone so he could screenshot the
text and post to facebook via
instagram.<p>I think the "millenials" - who should
be referred to as generation byte - get
undeserved flak, as all generations do,
for being younger and prettier and
living in a different world.<p>But this kid calling himself a prodigy
is a clear indication of way too many
gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
to ensure that no such abominable
script ever does anything besides
bomb somebody's twitter account, this
comment shows up exactly 50% of the
time, and I encourage others to do
the same.
--><p>Found my new favorite blogger; s'cept for PG.
I understand punctuation fine, and I think the author is wrong. While commas in general are not governed by hard rules, the "Oxford comma" is an extremely specific use of the comma: to separate the listing of 3 or more equal items. There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable.<p>No offense to the author, who might be reading this, but it's possible to be too proud of your writing history and cleverness. Many people have had English teachers they loved, and any good writer has had a moment where they realized, or were told, to throw out the rules.<p>It's essential to note that these moments always come in high school or college or later, when kids already have more than a decade of writing instruction under their belts. No one tells a second-grader to throw out all the rules.<p>Because you're not actually supposed to throw them out. It's just a teaching technique to break through bad writing habits.
Most of the time, you can use the Oxford comma, the non-Oxford comma or any other kind of comma, and it just doesn't make any difference.<p>But sometimes you need it. Here's an example:<p>"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration, and off-by-one errors."<p>Take out the comma and you ruin the joke - at least to my ears:<p>"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration and off-by-one errors."
I was never taught about the Oxford Comma (I'm not a native speaker), but trained myself to use it consistently after seeing this <a href="http://jaced.com/blogpix/2013/washingtonlincolnoxford.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://jaced.com/blogpix/2013/washingtonlincolnoxford.jpg</a>.<p>This has made me rethink though - he makes a great point that writing is about transferring the voices in my head into the readers', so I'll keep that in mind for any creative writing.<p>Heck, not just creative writing, I can think of more than one occasion where I put an Oxford Comma in a press release even though it read better to me without.<p>Thanks for sharing!
Loved his points about how you can hear punctuation in speech:<p>"Morgan Freeman is liberal with the commas, and Jon Stewart is a master of parentheses. Lewis Black made a career out of the exclamation point while Dennis Leary barely uses any punctuation at all."<p>Overall, a great Sunday morning read.
> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea.<p>This is simply a run-on, not a use of an Oxford comma as I understand it. And these bother me a lot.<p>"An oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice"<p>is a grammatically complete sentence. So is<p>"it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea."<p>Separate them by a strong punctuation mark. If you want the rhythm of a comma, separate them by a semi-colon in preference to a stop. Semi-colons are made for this.
The problem is that many people have horrible rhythm when speaking, too. Telling them to just transfer that on the page results in horrible punctuation.
Only tangentially related, but it's the weekend, so what the hell, enjoy:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g</a>
This is really nice to have footnotes just next to the line there are called from[0].<p>I rarely stumble upon a web page that actually improves on the paper format but this one does.<p>[0] There must be a better way to phrase this.
Punctuation is about rhythm. Writing is about communication. And I start sentences with "and" all the time.<p>I hardly know my grammar rules and I don't care. But I do care about making sure that writing is clear.<p>That's the basic rule I've applied to the hundreds of books that I've edited. Oxford comma. Huh?
This article makes me think about a question to which I still haven't found an answer:<p>For me (I'm not a native english speaker by the way), when reading out loud a text, all commas are "translated" by a pause. But there are some sentences for which I don't understand why a comma is used, as I wouldn't pause at the comma when saying these sentences out loud.<p>For example:<p>> The problem is that many people have horrible rhythm when speaking, too.<p>or<p>> Thank you, John.<p>In both these sentences, when reading them out loud, I wouldn't pause where there is a comma. And I actually never heard someone pause at these commas.<p>So am I mistaken in thinking that commas should always be orally translated by pauses? Or do you pause at the comma when saying these sentences?
Half the time when I hear Barack Obama speak, I imagine his speechwriter typing out
", and this nation cannot afford that<period><tab><tab><tab>So I have been..."
For every damn sentence.
If you have an hour and this topic really interests you, I'd recommend David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage" - <a href="http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...</a>.<p>He covers (very fairly and entertainingly, IMO) the major divide between linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists, and why both camps have a point.
Is it just me, or does this guy sound a little like James Mickens, the hilarious Microsoft blogger? <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/12/24/10484402.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/12/24/10484...</a>
The English teacher beginning his lesson with "So." reminded me of this piece:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22iht-currents.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22iht-currents.html</a><p>(SO this is about the word “so.”)
> Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.<p>Had to read this several times because the horrible punctuation made the sentence unreadable without thinking.
> Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath<p>A great book that looks at how punctuation characters date back to ancient greek writing and how it was used to show how text should be read is Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EAA6QHC/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EAA6QHC/</a><p>Edit: You can read the first chapter in the preview with pictures of the ancient texts
Ouch. Fairly nicely written piece about punctuation, and generally nicely formatted with justification, properly indented paragraphs, use of em dashes, and so on; and then it uses straight quotes everywhere. While I'm generally used to straight quotes everywhere on the web, the additional standard set by the rest of the typesetting and the topic meant that their omission here was that much more glaring.
<i>In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas, which can also denote side info but they do it more casually, and parentheses.</i><p>"and parentheses" what? And they are also like em dashes?<p>Edit: Thank you for the explanation folks. For whatever reason I found the use of commas to denote the aside very difficult to parse. I think maybe it's because of the first comma after "In this case."
I enjoyed this essay immensely. I'm a bit of a pedant and a language geek (I have a collection of favourite archaisms!) but my favourite saying about our language is:<p>"English is a juggernaut truck: it goes on regardless"<p>I find it useful to say that to myself when I encounter some of the net's more egregious assaults on the language. It's not an assault, it's the language doing what it does.
As with most art forms, the key is to learn the rules and then how to break them. Caring about minutiae like Oxford commas matters to people who know the rules including many who don't know when to break them, but pedants who cling to rules beyond their point of uselessness don't make the rules not worth understanding.
> and give the teachers a few things to decorate with smiley faces and Xs<p>This little snippet made it pretty clear to me that the vast majority of my teachers weren't educating, but ticking check-boxes on whether I had fulfilled X,Y, and Z requirements.
This was a joy to read. I highly recommend reading it out loud to someone. Try the techniques the author mentioned, and laugh out loud when he uses one of the techniques ironically.<p>A wonderfully written piece of art. And excellently communicated, too.
On semicolon, this is a good read :<a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon</a>
Sure, the oxford comma is not important unless it is disambiguating. But let's go meta and ask, Why do you care so much that people care? It's not like great or even good writers are getting hung up on whether or not to use the oxford comma. It's not like people loose jobs over the oxford comma.<p>Everyone with half a brain knows those rules are guidelines. Just like how you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition at. This post is the long form, literary version of feeding the trolls.
In every case where you have to decide between two options and both have advantages and disadvantages you should go with the popular one. In the case of the Oxford comma this means following what most of the world (including the publishing world) does and avoid it. The grammar of many languages forbids the Oxford comma, so there's no reason to keep this controversy going on with no real purpose.