Should there be a comma after Y in the phrase "X, Y and Z"?
A lot of people say there should - it's called the Oxford comma - but they're wrong. In most cases there's no need for a comma there.
Fans of the Oxford comma are fond of coming up with examples where you do need a comma after Y:
My heroes are my grandparents, Batman and Wonder Woman.
Yes, you do need one after Batman there to make it clear you don't come from a family of superheroes.
But this morning I came across an example where adding an Oxford comma had made the sentence confusing:
Steve Rotherham, the former Labour Leader of Leeds, and the former Chief Executive of Manchester are to take over control of Liverpool City Council from Liverpool Labour councillors.
When I read that I thought "I didn't know Steve Rotherham was from Leeds, I thought he was from Liverpool."
But he isn't from Leeds: this sentence is about three people.
The comma after Leeds makes it read as though "the former Labour Leader of Leeds" is a subclause describing Steve Rotherham. Take that comma out and you read the sentence correctly first time.
Most questions about grammar and punctuation aren't a matter of right and wrong so much as of good style.
I find Oxford commas pernickety and prefer to do without them wherever possible.
And if a poor little comma is doing all the work of saving a sentence from nonsense, maybe you need to rewrite that sentence so it's clearer?
2 comments:
Absobloodylutely!
My view is mostly from having to do close readings of many texts and my conclusion is that a writer really ought to be consistent in their own writing. The idea that one might use a serial comma in some instances but not others is thus one I couldn’t get along with. In my own writing I would say that if one is including a sub-clause when writing a list of items then those items shouldn’t be separated by a comma at all but by a semi-colon (as is normal for lists of longer strings of words) and that the serial comma is not to blame for this confusion at all!
Personally I don’t like the name Oxford Comma either. As I understand it OUP adopted the comma but didn’t invent it and it’s association with them is purely for appearance’s sake (good or bad)
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