What is the Oxford Comma? And Who Cares?

What is the Oxford comma? And who cares about it?

Writers, for one. Readers, too.

The Oxford comma, also called the “serial comma” or “Harvard comma,” is the final comma in a series of words or phrases. It sometimes appears after the second-to-last item—as in “We had sandwiches, chips, and soda for lunch.” But often it’s omitted—as in “We had sandwiches, chips and soda for lunch.”

According to grammarians, the Oxford comma is entirely optional. It’s not surprising that the comma has both its advocates and detractors. And then there’s the vast majority of English readers who could care less.

So why am I even talking about this?

Bear with me for a minute.

Where would you place commas in these sentences?

• Our flag is red, white (?) and blue.
• A dog, a cat (?) and a boy were playing.
• The dog chased the cat, the cat scratched the dog (?) and the child ran after them.
• The party was wild because James wore a lamp shade for a hat, Mattie passed out under the piano after too many martinis (?) and her boyfriend Alex made moves on another girl.
• The panda in a restaurant eats, shoots (?) and leaves.*

Your Choice

Grammarians say that you can replace all my question marks in the first four examples with commas if you please. Personally, I’d omit them after “white” in the first sentence and “cat” in the second. The sentences are perfectly clear without them. The tendency among writers these days is to conserve on punctuation rather than dot their manuscripts with unnecessary commas, semicolons, colons and dashes.

My Preference

In the third and fourth sentences I’d insert commas after “dog” and “martinis.” Why? Without the comma after “dog,” the reader might initially think that the cat scratched both the dog and the child. In the fourth sentence, without a final comma the reader doesn’t know whether or not Alex’s moves on another girl caused Mattie to pass out under the piano. In the old saw about pandas, the first comma needs to be deleted, and then a comma after “shoots” depends on whether the panda eats both“shoots and leaves”or eats shoots and then makes its way out of the restaurant.

I vote for clarity first, brevity second. And, of course, it’s essential in the last sentence. If the Oxford comma eliminates ambiguity, use it.

For complete guidelines on proper punctuation, refer to:

The Elements of Style, 4^th edition, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. 1999.

Chicago Manual of Style, 17^th edition, by U. Chicago Editorial Staff, 2017.

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*This ambiguous sentence refers to Lynn Truss’s popular book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003)