Have you ever wondered why it's called the "Oxford comma"? We have the answer to that and many more questions you may have about this controversial punctuation mark. Plus, we'll also talk about why it's fine to start a sentence with "and" (and why you were probably taught that it's not). | Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. | Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. | Peeve Wars card game. | Grammar Girl books. | HOST: Mignon Fogarty | VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) | Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. | Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. | Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Have you ever wondered why it's called the "Oxford comma"? We have the answer to that and many more questions you may have about this controversial punctuation mark. Plus, we'll also talk about why it's fine to start a sentence with "and" (and why you were probably taught that it's not).
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.
| Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl
http://twitter.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
Today, we’ll talk about the most controversial of all the punctuation marks, the Oxford comma, and then we'll talk about starting a sentence with the word “and.” And finally, I’ll have the winning poem from the ACES National Grammar Day poetry contest.
The Oxford comma is the comma that goes before the final “and” in a series. For example, if I write “snorts, howls, and guffaws,” if I put a comma after “howls” and before the word “and,” that’s an Oxford comma.
Who Called It the ‘Oxford Comma’?
It’s also called the serial comma or, rarely, the series comma or the Harvard comma, but the name Oxford comma seems to be the most popular, and it gets that name because it’s the style used by the influential Oxford University Press.
The name “Oxford comma” is newer than you might think though. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first printed use of the term in 1978, although it’s likely it had already been used among editors for at least a few years before then because the example is from an informal history of the Oxford University Press and is talking about the origin of the comma rule. In fact, I found what I believe is an example from 1974 in the Google Books database, although I wasn’t able to see the whole thing.
By contrast, I found references to the phrase “serial comma” from as far back as 1935 and “series comma” from as far back as 1919.
Who Invented the Oxford Comma?
The first style book to recommend using the Oxford comma came out in 1905 in England, and Strunk’s first edition of “The Elements of Style,” which came out a few years later in America, in 1918, also recommended the serial comma.
The 1905 book credited with establishing the Oxford comma rule is titled “Author and Printer: A Guide for Authors, Editors, Printers, Correctors of the Press, Compositors, and Typists” by Francis Howard Collins, and it appears that Collins and his famous biologist/philosopher friend, Herbert Spencer, hashed out the idea of the serial comma in a personal correspondence that Collins later quoted in his book. Collins and Spencer did not give it the name serial comma or Oxford comma, instead, Collins addressed the point in an entry about the word “and” with the heading "and” or “, and.” Here’s what that entry says:
“The late Herbert Spencer allowed me to quote from his letter: — ‘whether to write “black, white, and green,” with the comma after "white," or to leave out the comma and write “black, white and green” — I feel very decidedly in favor of the first. To me, the comma is of value in marking out the component elements of a thought, and where any set of a component of elements are of equal value, they should be punctuated in printing and in speech equally. Evidently therefore in this case, inasmuch as when enumerating these colours black, white, and green, the white is just as much to be emphasized as the other two, it needs the pause after it just as much as the black does.’” (See the manuscript scan at Google Books.)
An interesting but unrelated note is that Spencer is also credited with coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
So as far as we know, that’s the origin of the serial comma rule. It originally had to do with giving each element equal weight rather than being valued for adding clarity to lists, which is often the argument you hear for using it today.
So now let’s get on to how to use the Oxford comma and when you should. Ultimately, it’s a style choice.
Do You Always Have to Use Serial Commas?
Although the British are less likely to use the Oxford comma than Americans (1, 2), primarily it's newspapers that allow writers to omit that final comma (1, 3). For example, although most American style guides, such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual, say to always use the Oxford comma, it’s the Associated Press Styleguide that says it’s OK to leave it out in simple sentences. The theory is that newspapers were often looking to save space when you could only get them in print, and that leaving out the comma in simple sentences is fine because it doesn’t change the meaning or make them harder to understand.
Consider this sentence:
When you look at worldwide sales, the top-grossing movies of all time are currently “Avatar,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Titanic.”
I didn't use a serial comma in that sentence, and it was easy to read, and there wasn't any confusion.
Always Use Serial Commas to Prevent Confusion
Even in AP style though, you have to use the Oxford comma in more complicated sentences, for example when the items in the list have internal conjunctions (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Here’s a sentence that could mean different things with and without the final comma: “Rebecca was proud of her new muffin recipes: blueberry, peanut butter and chocolate chip and coconut.”
Without an Oxford comma, you can’t be sure whether the last recipes are peanut butter alone and a combination of chocolate chip and coconut, or peanut butter combined with chocolate chips and then coconut alone.
You can make the meaning clear in two ways: You can place the final comma after “peanut butter” or after “chocolate chip,” or rewrite the sentence so that there is no ambiguity.
If you want to say that the combination is peanut butter and chocolate chip, you can write “blueberry, peanut butter and chocolate chip, and coconut,” or if you insist on leaving out the serial comma, you can rewrite the list as “peanut butter and chocolate chip, coconut and blueberry.” But I still think the rewrite is more risky than the sentence with the serial comma because a reader who's just skimming the sentence could be tempted to think that coconut and blueberry is a combination.
Another case where leaving the comma out can be confusing is when the later items in the list can describe an earlier item. An oft-cited example is the made-up book dedication “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” A reasonable reader would assume there are at least four entities being thanked: parent #1, parent #2, Ayn Rand, and God; but without the Oxford comma you could also conclude that the two parents are Ayn Rand and God. An Oxford comma clears up any possible confusion: “To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.”
And even in AP style, you also use an Oxford comma when each element in your series is a phrase, as in “Squiggly wondered whether Aardvark had caught any fish, whether Aardvark would be home for dinner, and whether Aardvark would be in a good mood.” The last two parts of the sentence are just so long that they benefit from being broken up by a comma.
When an Oxford Comma Won’t Help
Finally, there are sentences where even an Oxford comma doesn't make the meaning clear. Consider this sentence: “We got to meet Dolly Parton, a singer and a philanthropist.”
Without the serial comma—“We got to meet Dolly Parton, a singer and a philanthropist”—it could mean that Dolly is both a singer and a philanthropist, or that we got to meet three people: Dolly, an unnamed singer, and an unnamed philanthropist.
With the serial comma—“We got to meet Dolly Parton, a singer, and a philanthropist”—it could still mean two different things. It could mean I got to meet three people (Dolly, an unnamed singer, and an unnamed philanthropist), or it could mean I got to meet two people (Dolly, who is a singer, and an unnamed philanthropist).
If you want your meaning to be clear in that sentence, the comma won’t get you there. You need to rewrite it to something like “We got to meet the singer and philanthropist, Dolly Parton.”
The Bottom Line on Oxford Commas
So, the bottom line is that using the serial comma is a style choice. Most publications except newspapers favor using it all the time, and all publications call for a serial comma when leaving it out could cause confusion. And sometimes sorting out your meaning is just too much for one little comma, and the best option is to rewrite your sentence.
Using the Oxford comma is a style choice
Although the Oxford comma isn't always necessary, I like it, and I use it all the time because I like to have a simple, consistent style instead of trying to decide whether you need something on a case-by-case basis. And I just like how it looks too.
But using the Oxford comma is a style choice — a preference — and not an absolute rule of grammar. And even though I’m on #TeamOxfordComma, I’ll die on the hill that Associated Press writers are fine leaving it out of simple sentences. I defend your right to leave out the Oxford comma. But I’m still going to keep using it myself too.
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Since we were just talking about commas before “and,” let’s also talk about starting a sentence with “and!” This next segment is by Edwin Battistella, so when I say “I,” that’s him.
I always see some shocked faces when I tell a classroom of college students that there is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with the word “and” (or for that matter, the words “but,” “because,” or “however”).
I encourage them not to take my word for it, but to look it up, so I refer them to Ernest Gowers’ 1965 revision of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which explains that the idea is “a faintly lingering superstition.” I also often suggest Garner’s Modern American Usage, which calls it a “rank superstition.” Superstitions don’t age well, apparently.
Even Wilson Follett’s stuffy Modern American Usage calls the rule “a prejudice [that] lingers from the days of schoolmarmism rhetoric.” William Safire included it in his book of “misrules” of grammar, and Strunk and White didn’t mention it as a problem at all. So there.
Yet the superstition persists, and it remains a common belief among students entering college.
The “and” style, which linguists sometimes call paratactic, is common in early middle and early modern English, as a look at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Canterbury Tales, or the King James Bible will show. So how did this bit of folklore come about?
The idea that one shouldn’t begin a sentence with “and” was not one of the prescriptive dicta proposed by eighteenth century Bishop Robert Lowth or by his imitator Lindley Murray, but it did show up in some nineteenth century language commentary. As Dennis Baron first noted, George Washington Moon singled “and” out in his 1868 book “The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers on the English Language.”
Moon wrote that “It is not scholarly to begin a sentence with the conjunction ‘and.’” (He was referring to George Perkins Marsh, the scholar, diplomat, and environmentalist who penned “Lectures on the English Language” in 1860.) Marsh’s comment is telling, because he refers to sentence-initial “and” as “not scholarly,” suggesting that avoiding “and” is a matter of style or rhetoric.
The misconception that it is an error of grammar is a generalization of the reasonable rhetorical advice not to overuse coordination. If writers rely only on "and," essays can become a mere sequential narrative: “It was summer and we went to the beach. And the sand on the beach was very hot. And after a while we got tired so we went home. And Mikey got sand in his bathing suit and the sand got all over the car.” You get the idea.
But what changed from the days of the King James Bible with its many sentence starting “and”s? One thing that changed was that scientific writing emerged as a genre with a great deal of prestige. Charles Bazerman’s 1988 classic study “Shaping Written Knowledge” traced the history of writing in “The Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society of London,” noting that scientific writing shifted from observations of the natural world to proof-like tests of theories. In fact, scholar Heidrun Dorgeloh compared the frequency of sentence-initial “and” in Modern English and Early Modern English narrative and scientific texts. She concluded that the use of “and” to begin a sentence “became associated with older, more narrative, and hence less professional style, and thus became increasingly stigmatized.” Her conclusion echoes George Washington Moon’s remark that beginning a sentence with “and” was somehow “not scholarly.”
Another thing that changed was mass education and the challenge of teaching sentence structure and writing conventions to large numbers of children. Several scholars have suggested that the supposed incorrectness of sentences beginning with “and” arose from efforts by school teachers to direct pupils away from the overuse of “and.” As linguist Arnold Zwicky put it:
Teachers quite rightly view this system of sentence connection as insufficiently elaborated, and they seek ways of getting students to produce connectives that have more content than vague association or sequence in time. At some point, I speculate…a blanket proscription, was born. Probably in elementary schools, from which it would have diffused to secondary schools and beyond.
But as students move beyond the elementary levels, we need to let them know that it is no error to begin a sentence with a conjunction. Professional writers and editors whom I have asked find sentence-initial conjunctions unobjectionable. One editor recently for a national publication put it to me this way: “As editorial director, I’m the decider. And I frequently use them in my own writing. And I allow them.”
And while we don’t know who first articulated the superstition that sentence initial conjunctions are errors, it is the sort of superstition we should be careful not to pass along to future generations.
Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has served as a dean and as interim provost. He is the author of Do You Make These Mistakes in English?, Bad Language, and The Logic of Markedness. This piece originally appeared on the OUP blog and is included here with permission.
Finally, this week, instead of a familect story, I have the winning entry from the ACES National Grammar Day poetry contest. Here’s Claire Valgardson reading her poem.
The en dash said to the em dash,
"As brackets, you're overly brash.
You don't get the ball rollin'
As well as a colon—"
"I have," it broke in, "more panache!”
Thank you and congratulations.
Claire Valgardson is a Toronto-based academic copy editor and proofreader specializing in APA Style, particularly in psychology, education, and the social sciences. She also edits nonfiction, business reports, web content, and “most other things that are written in English.”
According to the ACES blog post, in approaching her limerick, Valgardson said she originally wanted to explain the difference between an en dash and an em dash, but the meter and rhyme weren't coming together.
She said, “The em dash is an artistic (and some would say superfluous) punctuation mark, while the en dash is very prosaic. I hoped to get that across while highlighting the one function of the em dash that it doesn't share with any other punctuation mark—that of interrupting dialogue!”
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
Thanks to my audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and my editor Adam Cecil, who has always wanted to visit Babyland General Hospital, the Cabbage Patch Kids company store and fake hospital, in Georgia. (Can I just tell you, I’m learning so many interesting things about our team with these little credit stories.) Our assistant manager is Emily Miller, our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, and our Ad Operations Specialist is Morgan Christiansen.
That’s all. And if you've made it this far, thanks for listening with my scratchy voice this week. Bye.
References for the Oxford comma segment
1.Wikipedia contributors. “Serial Comma,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma (accessed March 9, 2022).
2. Quinion, M. “Oxford Comma,” "World Wide Words," http://tinyurl.com/24hncf6 (accessed March 9, 2022).
3. Walsh, B. "Lapsing Into a Comma." Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2004, p. 81.
4. "Serial Commas," The Chicago Manual of Style. Seventeenth Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Section 6.19. 2017.
5. Shaw, H. "Punctuate It Right." New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1993, p. 77.
6. "comma(,)" The AP Stylebook https://www.apstylebook.com/ap_stylebook/comma-2 (accessed March 10, 2022).
7. The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 100.