With all the questions swirling around us, one that doesn’t get enough attention is the role of the comma. Yet ask almost anyone about the placement of a comma, and you’ll get a passionate reaction.
I told a well-read, non-author friend the other day that I hate adding commas before the word “and” in sentences consisting of lists. This is the infamous “serial” or “Oxford” comma. I gave the example of “red, white, and blue.” What, I asked her, does the second comma add?
“I like the comma there,” she said. “It makes you pause.”
“Why would you want to pause there?”
“Because it makes you think. Yes, I like it a lot.”
I tried to get a word in, but the question had agitated her.
“Really a lot. Makes you think. No comma, no punch.”
Why had I used an example that was bound to incite patriotic fervor?
A more neutral example is a sentence that is the source of dispute between my current editor and me: “In the playground, I looked around as if for the first time at the rain-sodden grass, white-gray concrete and sepia tree trunks.”
The editor wants a comma before “and sepia tree trunks.” Why? Because it makes you pause. It makes you think.
I said, “To me, it disrupts the flow of the sentence.” I went on: “Readers respect a poet’s decisions when it comes to lines of verse, so why can’t they give the same credit to authors and their sentences?”
My argument overlooks the awkward fact that while editors might accept whatever a poet does with a line of verse, no one reads poems anymore unless it’s a cute limerick or a verse from their schooldays. As for prose, more people read the occasional book than poems, but almost no one notices a well-crafted sentence. However, they do notice commas.
Hoping to achieve good comma karma, I put the question to Perplexity.AI. It elicited the answer that there is no consensus about the serial comma. No consensus when it comes to writers and editors means there’s a raging debate in which egos and sometimes bodies are bruised.
Here’s how the Perplexity.AI entry concluded: “Despite the lack of consensus, many experts and style guides advocate for consistent use of the serial comma to avoid potential confusion. However, some argue that it should be used only when necessary for clarity.”
Does the second comma in “red, white, and blue” make the sentence clearer?
Perplexity.AI reports that the one field where the serial comma is consistently applied is business publications. That’s all creative writers need to justify an anti-serial comma bias.
So there! Case closed!
Now, what about the exclamation point …?
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