By Elise Tran, Designer-in-Chief
The oxford comma: it’s important, useful, and clarifies the sentence.
In case you didn’t know, the oxford comma is the last comma before the conjunction in a list of three or more items.
The oxford comma clarifies the list acknowledging the last item or subject as its own entity. There are many times where an oxford comma is useful.
Examples:
Without the oxford comma: My family invited the construction workers, Jim and Bob.
With the oxford comma: My family invited the construction workers, Jim, and Bob.
Without the oxford comma, it’s possible for readers to assume that Jim and Bob are the construction workers. With the help of the oxford comma, it clarifies that Jim, Bob, and the construction workers are all different people.
Yes, there are instances where oxford commas aren’t needed. This is one of the main arguments for opponents of the oxford comma that it’s simply unnecessary. However, this doesn’t apply to all cases as shown above. In order to just keep the consistency, might as well use the oxford comma all of the time.
There are cases when the oxford comma is required for legal purposes. For example, a dairy company, based in Maine, lost $5 million, because of the lack of the oxford comma resulted in unclear tasks.
Why shouldn’t we use the oxford comma? It doesn’t hurt adding a tiny little marking that could make the biggest difference.
