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Monday, July 4, 2016

Do you use the Oxford comma?

For the initiated, an Oxford comma is the comma before the word 'and' in a list.

As in:  Potatoes, leeks, onions, and lettuces are all vegetables.

Personally, I don't like it.  Lots of people don't.  But writers have to live with the house styles of their publishers, and so I have countenanced it on many occasions.

And a video laying out its origin and popularity has gone viral ....


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Definitely no Oxford commas. They don't clarify anything, or make a sentence easier to read, they just clutter.

World of the Written Word said...

Could not agree more. And I have to confess that I like the American version of quoe marks outside the full stop or comma. It looks so much tidier.