Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
stilldrinking.org
stilldrinking.org
I am more than happy to truly believe this premise (and if you read some of the things I write, and how I use punctuation, I hope the reader will agree ;P), and can come up with situations where the extra comma "breaks the rythm" and cases where it "makes the sentence".
> Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.
However, I simply can't bring myself to read this without speaking "rythm, and pattern": the sentence is expertly crafted and frankly sounds amazing; but, if I accept the author's premise that he really and truly carefully decided to not put a comma there because he didnt want me to pause, the sentence sounds horrible: in fact, this sentence sounds pretty un-lyrical to me unless I also add a pause--yes, not one but two added commas--after "pattern", at which point I would say it sounds downright powerful; I could, alternatively, appreciate a smaller pause between "momentum" and "syncopation", which would form a grouping that I think almost sounds even better? (though which I have a difficult time "performing"), but then we have to give up the first comma as well: "momentum/syncopation, rythm and pattern, are"... I really would love to hear the author read this sentence of the article out loud.
I think the tumbling-forward interpretation works better with the list having four elements. They're meant to be a cumulative item, making his point as much by the number of different elements as by the meaning of each individual one. This style works better when it gives the impression of rushing.
Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!" -- which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things. People don't talk that way out loud when they mean to include the first two items in the list.
Frankly, with writing in natural languages, hard-and-fast rules like, "Oxford Comma are always unambiguous," and, "Always avoid passives," tend to make your writing weaker, because there are still some cases in which Oxford Commas are ambiguous and passives are the right tool for the job. What makes great writing, whether it be creative writing or contract writing or what-have-you, is knowing when to apply such rules and when to disregard them.
In this case the serial comma isn't creating any ambiguity, the bad writing is (and the serial comma shifts the ambiguity to the second/third item being listed). When they suggest a better way to write the example sentence, it uses the Oxford comma both times (though I'd argue that the second sentence isn't a solution).
I agree that nothing is ever absolute (hah), but the Oxford comma takes care of ambiguities most of the time, and merely shifts the ambiguity around when appositive phrases are thrown into the mix. And reducing ambiguity should be the goal of every writer.
The thing about just admitting you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous while keeping the comma is that it simultaneously admits that you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous without the comma... which puts us back at aesthetic arguments.
My favourite example of this is "We partied with the strippers, Stalin and Hitler".
> Without a serial comma, the above dedication would read: To my mother, Ayn Rand and God, a phrase ambiguous only if the reader accepts the interpretation my mother, who is both Ayn Rand and God.
That's exactly the same grammatical interpretation (i.e. the comma indicates an appositive) that was suggested to be ambiguous with the Oxford comma present.
The ambiguity in the example is in whether his mother is Ayn Rand, not whether she's god.
It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that"
>which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things.
This sounds like a projection, not from the sound of the phrase, but from your a priori idea about what the oxford comma would do there (e.g that it would evenly split the items of the list).
It seems to me that arguing about what a comma means when put in this or that place is symptomatic of this programmer mindset. Natural languages are ambiguous, redundant and sometimes inconsistent by non-design. And so is their punctuation. Nobody understand punctuation, especially programmers.
- [x,xs] is the list defined by exactly the element x followed by the element xs;
- x:xs is the list defined by the element x followed by the list xs.
So the 1st instance: [x,xs] looks unprofessional and n00b-ish.
It's the 2nd instance that's idiomatic.
Momentum - 3 syllables
Syncopation - 4 syllables
Rhythm and pattern - 5 syllables
momENtum, SYNcoPATion, RHYthm and PATtern
___--___ ---__---___ ---___ ___ ---____
moMENtum [beat] syncoPATion [beat] rhythm-and-PATtern [no beat so continues straight on]
And all three patterns, including the beat, take the same time, with the remainder of the sentence continuing at the same speed as PATtern.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pattern: /ˈpat(ə)n/ or /ˈpædəɹn/
Momentum, syncopation, rhythm-and-pattern: these make a sentence flow, because...
explanation-for ((make-sentence-flow) (momentum, syncopation, rhythm-and-pattern)) (...)> However, I simply can't bring myself to read this without speaking "rythm, and pattern": the sentence is expertly crafted and frankly sounds amazing; but, if I accept the author's premise that he really and truly carefully decided to not put a comma there because he didnt want me to pause, the sentence sounds horrible
I think the author's sentence (and intended flow) was very clear.
I've tried to solve the same problem in a different way though, by using '&' where I want a conjuction to join two words instead of parts of a sentence or list.
E.g. "Momentum, syncopation, rhythm & pattern make a sentence flow".
This is arguably much worse, especially if you're not normally having to read ampersands (which would cause a stall reading the sentence), but it also seems to ensure less complaints from the Oxford comma pedants.
Interestingly, though, when I read this the first time, I thought that last comma was there. It was only when I checked again that I realized it was not.
The pause is very natural and normal - but the comma seems unimportant for practical purposes.
<!-- So this guy we just interviewed at my current job wrote this little script to see if a product update for some company had come out. Every 10 seconds the script urllib'ed the page, checked the length of the html - literally len(html) - against the length it was last time it checked. He wrote a blog post about this script. A freaking blog post. He also described himself as "something of a child prodigy" despite, in another post, saying he couldn't calculate the area of a slice of pizza because "area of a triangle with a curved edge is beyond my Google-less math skills." Seriously dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20 years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty freaking obvious.
The script also called a ruby script to send him a tweet which another script was probably monitoring to text his phone so he could screenshot the text and post to facebook via instagram.
I think the "millenials" - who should be referred to as generation byte - get undeserved flak, as all generations do, for being younger and prettier and living in a different world.
But this kid calling himself a prodigy is a clear indication of way too many gold stars handed out for adequacy, so to ensure that no such abominable script ever does anything besides bomb somebody's twitter account, this comment shows up exactly 50% of the time, and I encourage others to do the same. -->
Found my new favorite blogger; s'cept for PG.
/*
Yeah, there's some shitty code here.
There are some things that shouldn't
be done. I did them. Sometimes, I had
my reasons. Sometimes, I was just being
lazy. But guess what? You're sitting
there reading the source on some guy's
blog. So fuck you.
*/Perhaps posting it to his blog was excessive, but it is a way of getting shared code out there.
No offense to the author, who might be reading this, but it's possible to be too proud of your writing history and cleverness. Many people have had English teachers they loved, and any good writer has had a moment where they realized, or were told, to throw out the rules.
It's essential to note that these moments always come in high school or college or later, when kids already have more than a decade of writing instruction under their belts. No one tells a second-grader to throw out all the rules.
Because you're not actually supposed to throw them out. It's just a teaching technique to break through bad writing habits.
Having said that, I'm on-the-fence about consistent Oxford Commaing. The article's suggestion to decide case-by-case is interesting (and the argument is very well written) but I'd have to read a longer piece that alternated to find out whether it bothers me.
The author of the article is right that writing is both a skill and an art form. The skilled writer can alter the way a sentence is understood by their choice of punctuation, but abandoning the rules should only be done when the author understands the consequences of breaking those rules; using explicit choices to guide the user to deeper understanding of the intended meaning.
"The policy is predicted to have payoffs in 8 to 12 years," "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years," or "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to twelve years." If I were writing that sentence, I would probably go with the first style as I believe it is the best for conveying what is important to the reader. All three say the same thing, but mixing the spelt and numeral forms is the most distracting and least legible.
If the numbers are figurative, poetic, or you want the reading-flow uninterrupted, you probably want letters, meaning that Carl Sagan gets quoted as "billions and billions", rather than "1,000,000,000s and 1,000,000,000s". Similarly, "we tried three times", rather than "we tried 3 times".
On the other extreme, if you expect people to compare or analyze with numbers as they read them, favor numerals. "A fan favorite, bookies give him odds of 10 to 3."
Is this written in the stars somewhere? This is exactly the kind of prescriptivism the author is arguing against. If you fall more towards that side of the spectrum, that's fine, but don't believe you're somehow more factually correct. Your interpretations of consistency and readability are not universal.
Aside from that, I would contend that the vast majority of serial commas are incidental to artistic merit. If you're deciding on the Oxford Comma, you've already used at least one comma, and you're just deciding on the last one. That seems to me a pretty marginal decision.
Excellent point about rule breaking though. You really can't start breaking the rules until you've learned them first. To be sure, some will learn them implicitly, but the rules aren't there to suck the soul out of an activity. They're there to give structure for people who would otherwise have no idea what they're doing.
There are times when you should absolutely throw out the rules.
The purpose of language is to communicate. More often than not, sticking to the rules enables more effective communication. But sometimes, not so much.
But sometimes you need it. Here's an example:
"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration, and off-by-one errors."
Take out the comma and you ruin the joke - at least to my ears:
"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration and off-by-one errors."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Critici...
>We went out for drinks, fish and chips, and some ice cream.
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
The joke.
Off-topic, but I like this version of the joke better:
There are two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, off-by-one errors, and cache invalidation.
HOWEVER, given that there is no "and" between 0 & 1, and that 1 & 2 are not like things, I believe most readers will naturally interpret the list as [0, 1, 2] and not [0, [1, 2]]. There are enough other cues that risk of misinterpretation is very low. Anyone who does interpret as [0, [1, 2]] is probably being willfully obtuse.
This has made me rethink though - he makes a great point that writing is about transferring the voices in my head into the readers', so I'll keep that in mind for any creative writing.
Heck, not just creative writing, I can think of more than one occasion where I put an Oxford Comma in a press release even though it read better to me without.
Thanks for sharing!
To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity
To my mother Ayn Rand, and to God
To my mother, Ayn Rand, and to God
EDIT: My sibling post has another good alternative.
To my mother, Ayn Rand, Jimmy, Bobbie and Sue.I've always felt that the use of parentheses for grouping is under-explored:
To ((my mother (Ayn Rand)) and God).
To {{my mother {Ayn Rand}} and God}.
Remove the comma and their mother is both Ayn Rand and God. That's a really terrible example since the Oxford Comma actually works slightly better than the alternative since the problem there is the ambiguity created by the ordering, not the punctuation.
If that's the best case they have against the Oxford comma it seems to be an exception that proves the rule.
You could say "To Ayn Rand, God, and my mother" and lose the ambiguity.
"Morgan Freeman is liberal with the commas, and Jon Stewart is a master of parentheses. Lewis Black made a career out of the exclamation point while Dennis Leary barely uses any punctuation at all."
Overall, a great Sunday morning read.
This is simply a run-on, not a use of an Oxford comma as I understand it. And these bother me a lot.
"An oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice"
is a grammatically complete sentence. So is
"it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea."
Separate them by a strong punctuation mark. If you want the rhythm of a comma, separate them by a semi-colon in preference to a stop. Semi-colons are made for this.
You're saying (and I tend to agree with you) that written punctuation is about meaning, and not about where a speaker would pause to take a breath.
Can these two be kludged into a unified meaning? "Write better so that your written words sound good when spoken"?
(The three songs by the way, if there was any doubt, would be "Hannah Hunt", "Diane Young" and "Hudson" or "Step" depending on taste)
I rarely stumble upon a web page that actually improves on the paper format but this one does.
[0] There must be a better way to phrase this.
I wish Amazon's ebook reader showed the footnotes in margin as his blog does. They weren't even shown on the same page.
Instead you had to follow a hyperlink to the last appendix of the book. You could then read the footnote w/o the original context; then you click a "back button" to get back to the text.
I hope more ebook readers find a use for the gigantic margins on widescreen displays. -- I would've preferred marginalized sidenotes over seeing two pages[1] of content.
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-Thought-Was-Fish-ebook/dp/B00... [1]: This is what Amazon's "kindle cloud reader" does when you maximize it on a 1080p display.
I hardly know my grammar rules and I don't care. But I do care about making sure that writing is clear.
That's the basic rule I've applied to the hundreds of books that I've edited. Oxford comma. Huh?
For me (I'm not a native english speaker by the way), when reading out loud a text, all commas are "translated" by a pause. But there are some sentences for which I don't understand why a comma is used, as I wouldn't pause at the comma when saying these sentences out loud.
For example:
> The problem is that many people have horrible rhythm when speaking, too.
or
> Thank you, John.
In both these sentences, when reading them out loud, I wouldn't pause where there is a comma. And I actually never heard someone pause at these commas.
So am I mistaken in thinking that commas should always be orally translated by pauses? Or do you pause at the comma when saying these sentences?
In the second example, adding a pause at that location sounds quite natural. It changes the meaning slightly, adding gravity to the statement, making the thank-you sound more heartfelt.
[I'm a native English speaker, and the commas-as-pauses way of thinking has always worked very well for me...]
About the first example, it seems to be commonly used: just in this HN thread, the ", too." pattern is used in 3 comments. But just like for you, a pause there sounds weird to me too.
So the sentence goes, "The problem is that many people have horrible rhythm while speaking, too."
To my taste, the sentence goes on a bit too long: an emphasis probably belongs somewhere in the middle: but perfection is hard to come by. :P
Commas began life as indicators of pause, but in modern English they are indicators of clause -- that is, they indicate grammatical structure. The places where we don't normally use pauses to indicate structure in spoken English (but still use commas in written English) are where you're noticing the discrepancy. Specifically, it's a common practice that you should use a comma to separate an adverb (like "too") from the rest of the sentence when it's being used to modify the sentence as a whole. This isn't a struct rule, and some people prefer a style of omitting such commas.
He covers (very fairly and entertainingly, IMO) the major divide between linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists, and why both camps have a point.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/us/22iht-currents.html
(SO this is about the word “so.”)
Had to read this several times because the horrible punctuation made the sentence unreadable without thinking.
A great book that looks at how punctuation characters date back to ancient greek writing and how it was used to show how text should be read is Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EAA6QHC/
Edit: You can read the first chapter in the preview with pictures of the ancient texts
They aren't. The first consonant is different; IPA [w] vs. IPA [hw].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_wh#Wine...
Edit: I just want to point out that despite what the map in the linked article says, the merger is complete in most of the urban areas in the Southeast as well. You'll usually only hear /hw/ in rural areas.
It's worth pointing out that this is not a universal style choice.
In my world, quotes are quotes and the distinction between ways of drawing them is infinitely irrelevant. That this is not true to someone else is actually surprising me.
"and parentheses" what? And they are also like em dashes?
Edit: Thank you for the explanation folks. For whatever reason I found the use of commas to denote the aside very difficult to parse. I think maybe it's because of the first comma after "In this case."
> In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas (which can also denote side info but they do it more casually) and parentheses.
The commas after "pair of commas" are the parenthetical commas he is describing
(if they didn't share the similarity I guess 'or' would fit better)
Today's punctuation rules may have awkward beginnings, but the rules are standard, familiar, and subconsciously expected. This actually improves the speed at which I can read. The author's style had several places that were difficult for me because I have been mentally trained on one set of road signs and meanings.
"English is a juggernaut truck: it goes on regardless"
I find it useful to say that to myself when I encounter some of the net's more egregious assaults on the language. It's not an assault, it's the language doing what it does.
This little snippet made it pretty clear to me that the vast majority of my teachers weren't educating, but ticking check-boxes on whether I had fulfilled X,Y, and Z requirements.
A wonderfully written piece of art. And excellently communicated, too.
Everyone with half a brain knows those rules are guidelines. Just like how you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition at. This post is the long form, literary version of feeding the trolls.
After a bit of clean up, it reads "If Yoda could make his point clear, nobody should give a shit about Oxford commas."
Cheers