[Ads-l] Oxford comma

[Stanton McCandlish]

It's important that it's also called the Harvard comma. It's not really a
matter of national dialect, but rather of academic register. More properly
called the serial comma, it's used more in writing that focuses on
precision (journals, encyclopedias) than material driven by expediency and
concision (journalism, blogging).

The habit I cultivate is to use serial commas when they aid clarity, drop
them when they don't, default to using them if in doubt, and be consistent
with them in the same piece of writing.

The two latter factors mean I use more of them than average. It's possible
this annoys a handful of comma haters – I encountered a self-declared one
on Facebook today – but no one has trouble parsing my material.

On Sun, Sep 1, 2024, 5:23 PM Martin Purdy <
00000bd8cf391c5b-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> That's one reason I don't believe in being a "100-percenter" when it comes
> to either favouring or avoiding the Oxford comma.  It isn't standard in my
> version of English but it has its uses in avoiding ambiguity.
> Martin
>
>
>     On Sunday, September 1, 2024 at 09:56:56 AM GMT+12, James Landau <
> 00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
>  Sign in a local gym:
> "Lunk (n) someone who grunts, drops weights or judges"
> I'm afraid that I try to interpret this as "drops weight or drops judges",
> that is, the verb-noun following the comma suggests verb-noun-same
> verb-noun.
> James Landau
> jjjrlandau at netscape.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org