Are you old enough to remember when the last comma in a series was omitted, mainly by newspapers? Geez, I'm glad that writing convention has mostly gone by the wayside. Even in elementary school, it just didn't seem right.
Consider this sentence: "I owe my love of music to my parents, Yo Yo Ma and Joan Jett."
I'm glad serial commas have held sway.
I feel much better now. It's been hard keeping my feelings on this issue under wraps.
Old Stuff
23 hours ago
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9 comments:
I need that comma! God bless the comma.
I was always taught to leave that comma out, but it just never felt right to do so.
I tend to overpunctuate. Love those commas!!
Funny, but this morning, anewscafe.com ran my first article on medical marijuana, featuring an interview with our sheriff. They edited very lightly, perhaps to spare the new guy's ego. But guess what most of the editing consisted of? Taking out commas. Har.
"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out." -- Oscar Wilde
Teaching elementary school kids every day I can tell you, with certainty, that last comma is blowin' in the wind. It's gone.
You are definitely a man after my heart. We are a weird fraternity who find this interesting.
I was taught from the time I took English that the last comma (wasn't it called the "Oxford comma?") should be there.
When I started taking Journalism classes, everything was about space and that's all that last comma did -- take up space.
Today I don't have strong feelings about it but, as my children will tell you, I am a stickler for grammar, punctuation, and proper word structure (you decide how I feel about that comma . . . ). :-)
How funny. I've found that commas are sneaky little things. I'm always pulling handfuls of them out of anything I write. I've always thought they were a lot like ants.
Like Kelly, I'm something of an overpunctuater. But I'm a comma chameleon! I puts 'em in and like Debby I usually go back and take as many out as I can depending on who I'm writing for.
Meanwhile, I'm going to go ponder what the love-child of YoYoMa and Joan Jett would look like.
Woman without man would be nothing.
Or something like that.
Restrain yourself, Hal.
quid
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