jackkansas (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jackkansas) wrote in aknitwit, |
Serial Commas
Consider this (correctly punctuated) sentence — "The colors of the flag are red, white, and blue." Now some people consider that it's o.k. to eliminate the comma before the conjunction, viz. — "The colors of the flag are red, white and blue." I don't see any positive reason to do this, but it works in this simple case. But when you have a more complicated sentence, it gets trickier — "Contestants' school colors are black and tan, blue and gold, and red and green." You can omit the serial comma in this example only if you assume that each school has two colors, which might not be the case. The larger problem is that omitting the serial comma forces the reader in each case to go through a logical exercise to determine the meaning of the sentence. The point of using punctuation is to make meaning abundantly clear, so the comma should be included.
A good example of the problem comes from my old Prentice-Hall Words into Type guide. Consider the sentence "Anna, May and Walter are here." Is the intent to tell Anna that May and Walter have arrived, or is it a statement that three people are present?
Unfortunately, even major publishing houses get this wrong. Robert Fisks's magnificent book on the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Random House, 2005) is marred by this blight. The tragedy is, omitting the comma introduces all kinds of ambiguities and makes the text more difficult to interpret, but gains you nothing. Rant, rant, rant!
Consider this (correctly punctuated) sentence — "The colors of the flag are red, white, and blue." Now some people consider that it's o.k. to eliminate the comma before the conjunction, viz. — "The colors of the flag are red, white and blue." I don't see any positive reason to do this, but it works in this simple case. But when you have a more complicated sentence, it gets trickier — "Contestants' school colors are black and tan, blue and gold, and red and green." You can omit the serial comma in this example only if you assume that each school has two colors, which might not be the case. The larger problem is that omitting the serial comma forces the reader in each case to go through a logical exercise to determine the meaning of the sentence. The point of using punctuation is to make meaning abundantly clear, so the comma should be included.
A good example of the problem comes from my old Prentice-Hall Words into Type guide. Consider the sentence "Anna, May and Walter are here." Is the intent to tell Anna that May and Walter have arrived, or is it a statement that three people are present?
Unfortunately, even major publishing houses get this wrong. Robert Fisks's magnificent book on the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Random House, 2005) is marred by this blight. The tragedy is, omitting the comma introduces all kinds of ambiguities and makes the text more difficult to interpret, but gains you nothing. Rant, rant, rant!
