Grammar Expose: Serial & Oxford Comma

Last week we talked about the third-person singular pronoun.

So this week let’s stick with our grammar expose and tackle another question that I continue to be asked, even though the answer is simple and has been established for a very, very long time:

Serial vs. Oxford comma

Luckily, I only get this one from English majors. Nobody else has ever heard of the debate, which I consider a good thing. Because it’s a complete red herring. There is no actual debate. The answer is not in question. And it makes complete sense.

  • Fiction

    In fiction, we put a comma after every item in a list.

    Except, of course, for the last item, which gets whatever punctuation belongs at the end of that particular list.

    Angela ate a chocolate bunny, a chocolate heart, a chocolate rose, and a chocolate elephant! In that order.

  • Non-fiction

    In non-fiction, we put a comma after every item in a list except the penultimate item.

    And except, of course, for the last item, which, again, gets whatever punctuation belongs at the end of that particular list.

    In other news today, Angela Lansbury ate a chocolate bunny, a chocolate heart, a chocolate rose and a chocolate elephant. According Lansbury, she ate them in that order.

See? Simple.

The issue isn’t a matter of editorial style or even idiomatic distinction between American and British English. The issue is fiction versus non-fiction. And the only reason the question exists at all is the journalistic necessity—which has created so very many of the questions of grammar that seem to plague English students today—to compress space.

Journalists are always in need of space on the page. So they make up little rules for themselves like dropping commas and other stuff in order to squeeze more words into smaller space. I wish I could say this is because journalists simply have that much news to report. But I’m afraid it’s more likely because they simply have that great a need to compress the news to make room for more advertising.

C’est le vie.

And now you know!

NOTE: The other issue is the complication of all this by using different terms for this type of comma usage: serial and Oxford. The are not terms for the opposite types of comma usage. They are the same thing.

NEXT WEEK: That vs. Which