This Question Of Punctuation
It keeps coming up. Let’s have fun with it
Found it! I read a story recently — this one — about the Oxford Comma, and suggest that you read it too. It’s funny.
In my time of not being able to find Kate Brennan’s story again, I found that the Oxford Comma tag has sixty-five stories attached to it, shortly to be sixty-six, and that the Oxford Comma is also known as the Serial Comma.
Sounds about right.
Among the forty-nine (so far) comments to Kate’s (may I call you Kate?) story is this from Mitch Trachtenberg. “31% of Americans continue to support the Oxford comma. In related news, five percent of Americans know what it is.”
And this, from Lisa Hides. “I thought this article was funny, clever, and deserving of a nod to the Oxford comma!”
Ha!
Any rules on little bold headings?
And just to be clear, before we go any further — I’m going to continue calling it the Oxford Comma, with the capital C. No reason; it just feels right. And yes, that was a semi-colon, and yes, I did just start this sentence, and paragraph, and not for the first time, oh, I can feel the caffeine kicking in, with “and”.
What next? A sentence without verbs?
I looked up “and”. It’s not a preposition; it’s a co-ordinating conjunction. I’m slightly interested to know that, but slightly more curious that I felt an urge to look it up.
If I call “and” a preposition, do I get denounced or cancelled? Do I care? Well, yes, it seems that I do, but thinking about it, that’s just years of fact-checking showing through.
I just like them, that’s all
I have known, but I can’t keep the knowledge in my head, what a “gerund” is. I’ve managed to get this far through my writing life without being at all clear about the Official Rules (caps for satirical emphasis) on what I’m allowed to do with semi-colons.
But that’s okay. I write for rhythm and to get across what I want to say. If I’m asked for writing advice, sooner or later I’ll say: write it as you would speak it. I won’t say: learn the difference between a gerund and a present participle (no idea, not breaking the flow to look it up).
Too many people — too many to quote just one — have said “When you know the rules, you can break the rules,” and I think being vague about the rules can count as knowing them. There’s no rule that says you have to remember the rules.
This one, for example
Writing changes, anyway. Language evolves, and writing it down evolves with it.
No, wait — hyphens!
“…writing-it-down evolves with it.”
I think I over-use hyphens — I’ll take it up with myself some day.
But really, being alert to language is what counts. Being interested enough to watch it grow and change.
[Hyphens are useful tools. So are apostrophes. Just saying.]
They’re like tiny chapter breaks, aren’t they?
I think I know what an Oxford Comma is. It’s the one in a list, isn’t it? [Nice one, Lisa Hides.] I use a lot of commas, and sometimes I put them in front of “and”.
Punctuation is what you use when you would take a breath — that’s not a rule exactly, but it works often enough.
Aren’t em dashes great, by the way?
Was that an Oxford Comma just now, couple of paragraphs back, or maybe it was a Headington Comma? There’s a university in Headington now, used to be the Oxford Poly, as well as the university in Oxford Proper.
Hm. Oxford Proper. I like that. With the capital P. Not least because it gives me the line that I spent a year doing a postgraduate diploma at, ah, Oxford Improper. Yes!
Not to be confused with the former prime minister Liz Truss, the writer and all-round good person Lynne Truss wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves in 2003. It’s subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, and if you search the title, you’ll see it referenced as often without the comma as with.
In these books by Martha Wells, the first-person narrator sometimes achieves clarity via a flexible use of grammar. I recommend the series anyway, but the way the stories are told gives them an extra kick.
