22.7.13

Another reason to oppose the Oxford Comma

Apart from the usual, that any sentence where the lack of a comma would cause semantic confusion is a sentence that should probably be re-ordered anyway. Students who arrive at college like commas altogether too much, as evidenced by their desire to place them in every single possible location within a sentence. Much better to teach them a uniform rule of comma minimization, only requiring in it circumstances that the logical flow of the sentence demands it.

(Prompted by a Facebook friend engaging in that annoying habit of putting someone's name in commas, i.e. "a history of scientist, firstname lastname, and on other topics besides")

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