09.18.08
Ho, ho; ho—part . . . II!
When I alerted you to the punctuational paraphernalia available at the official National Punctuation Day web site a couple of days back, I wrote that you could buy “greeting cards, posters and ‘latte mugs’ in addition to T-shirts” there. I hope that nationalpunctuationday.com appreciated the plug despite the fact that I didn’t, as would be the site’s preference, set enough commas into the wild in that phrase. Here’s a “news story” appearing on the site:
Punctuation Man, a leading authority on punctuation and teaching punctuation to elementary school children, today announced his decision to fully support the use of the serial comma.
Shunned by the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, the serial comma is still widely accepted by educators, grammarians, and literary circles, including Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and the Chicago Manual of Style. The announcement coincides with the National Education Association’s (NEA) “Read Across America” child literacy program, to be held nationwide on Monday, March 3.
Well, shunned is a bit strong. It’s not like the AP is, like Dexter, a serial killer hunting down and eliminating criminal serial commas. Here’s the AP’s advice: “Use commas to separate elements in a series, but do not put a comma before the conjunction in a simple series: The flag is red, white and blue.” Note “simple series,” as AP does not universally “shun” the serial comma and offers instances where it’s necessary. One such instance is a final series item that itself carries the word and: I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast. The AP also asks that the serial comma be placed before a complex concluding series element.
As with most things lingual, “rules” (if there are such things) are made to be bent elegantly. Plunking down a comma in a series just because it’s a rule, darnit! is not writing; it is following insert-tab-A-into-slot-B mechanical instruction.
Thoughts on when to use the serial comma:
- When the comma clarifies. This is the primary rule. Clear or not? “The flag is red, white and blue” is clear. “I want to thank my teachers, my parents and the Academy” is not—unless I mean to say that my parents and the Academy were my teachers.
- When the comma applies emphasis. The word growing tends to be swallowed in “My disappointment is deep-seated, constant, persistent and growing,” but gains emphasis in “My disappointment is deep-seated, constant, persistent, and growing.”
- When you can hear the comma. Let’s return to the original function of the comma. It was not at first a tool for organizing sentences. It was a timing tool. It told the readers of early texts, transcribed from oral stories and poetry, where to insert pauses. Other punctuation did the same; different marks for different pause lengths. Different marks, for; different. pause lengths. This gives us an additional physical test regarding whether a comma is appropriate in a series. Would the inserted comma mimic a pause in the sentence—a pause in addition to the pause already injected by the word and? “Red, white, and blue” introduces a pause—even a stutter—to an otherwise swiftly spoken redwhiteandblue.
With that, I shall cease, and desist.
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
