Showing posts with label minor annoyances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label minor annoyances. Show all posts

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")