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Arguments In Favor Of The Oxford Comma
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21 responses to “Arguments In Favor Of The Oxford Comma”
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I punctuate however I need to punctuate in order to make my meaning clear. As it happens I’m going over the copy-edits of a manuscript right now and explaining in the notes that no, I will not use semicolons because readers don’t know what the hell they mean.
In addition to seeking clarity I punctuate to either accelerate or slow the reader. Sort of like using reins and spurs on a horse, forcing them to walk, trot or gallop.
I simply ignore the manuals of style. Don’t care.
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@michael reynolds: FWIW, I had to re-read your opening sentence twice before I understood it: “I punctuate however I need to punctuate in order to make my meaning clear.” Don’t know if additional punctuating could have resolved the two different meanings of “however” though…
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@michael reynolds: Shouldn’t you use semicolons so that your readership–generally children between the ages of 9 and 14 as I understand the genre–will become used to seeing them and learn how they work as tools of communication?
Sort of on the order of,,, you know… building their reading skills so that they are not stuck at the 6th-grade level all their lives?
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@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker:
What am I, an educator? No, dude, my job is to entertain. Now, as it happens, that inevitably involves some teaching, but I am not primarily in the business of teaching grammar or punctuation.
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I will not use semicolons because readers don’t know what the hell they mean.
Just for my own clarification, you are talking about young readers, correct? Not readers in general.
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@Franklin:
Actually, I was sitting around with some big name kidlit writers – including in their number some English teachers – and we were laughing about copy editors and their love for semi-colons. None of us used semi-colons. None of us saw the point or advantage. Commas, periods, colons and m-dashes get the job done. -
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@michael reynolds:
I think his point was that you shouldn’t need to dumb down punctuation to younger readers. I am not familiar with your work, but from what I understand you don’t dumb down your vocabulary or content for young readers. You rightly see that young readers are capable of more than many give them credit for. If your choice not to use semicolons was purely stylistic or based simply on you not seeing much use for them, I could understand that. It is pretty easy to write in such a way that avoids both them and bad grammar; simply avoid sentences that use them by putting a period instead. Kids are smart enough to figure out that a semicolon means some kind of pause; give them a little more credit. -
@Grewgills:
At this point they’re essentially archaic. When you have a bunch of bestselling authors who can’t think of why you should use them. . .As for the other things, not only do I not dumb things down for teens, part of the reason I don’t write for adults is I would have to dumb things down for them. Kids have imaginations, adults less so.
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@michael reynolds:
For the type of writing you do I wouldn’t think they would often be useful. The only time I commonly use them is when I have a sentence with nested lists. blah blah blah xxx, xxx, xxx; yyy, yyy, yyy; zzz, zzz. I rarely use them to tie together to closely associated independent clauses.
I don’t know that you have to dumb things down for either. Adults can lose creativity, but great writing pulls it right back out in us. I am reading ‘The City and the City’ now by Mieville and he is fantastic at evocative world building without spoon feeding.
