Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to
share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of
appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer
assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all
kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank
you to the co-hosts for September: Beth Camp, Jean Davis, Yvonne Ventresca, and PJ Colando. To read posts
from other contributors, click here.
This month’s optional question: Since it's back to
school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in
school that messed you up as a writer?
English. Oy. So many rules and I’m supposed to choose only one?
This question brought me back to seventh grade. Our English teacher Miss Newman was lovely, but I had a lot going on that year and spent a good deal of class distracted, which is to say I failed to learn how to diagram a sentence. Enough rubbed off that I know my parts of speech, but how to punctuate them is a definite weakness.
In a display of I’m never too old to learn-itis, before receiving this month’s optional question, it happens I did a little research on the Oxford comma. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I knew the definition of an OC but I’ve encountered enough controversy about it online that I decided it was time to educate myself. Back in the day, I was taught that a comma before the conjunction preceding the last item in a list was optional, depending on what it did for clarity. My research revealed my “optional” comma is the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma. Much ado about not very much I suppose (except for a 2014 lawsuit in Maine you can read about here), but the general idea is to be consistent with usage and always make sure you are being clear.
Oxford comma: I live with my brothers, monkey, and snake.
No Oxford comma: I live with my brothers, monkey and snake.
Without the OC, it reads that the brothers are the monkey
and snake. With it, you can tell the brothers, monkey, and snake are separate parts of the list.
But when all is said and done, perhaps the best idea is to re-write
the sentence.
I live with my brothers. I also have a monkey and a snake.
Anyway, there is more debate than I even knew with regard to my “optional comma,” because my research revealed that the AP Stylebook (Hello journalists!)
does not use the OC, but the Chicago Manual of Style, used by book publishers,
does.
Aha. This explains a lot. I started my secondary education
as a journalism major before morphing to English Literature. Go figure. I guess
it’s easier to blame my OC lack of clarity on competing writing styles rather
than a failure to pay attention during ancient history.
Oops, sorry. I mean seventh grade English.
Where do you land on the Oxford Comma issue? What other writing rules confound you?
