Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

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I understand punctuation fine, and I think the author is wrong. While commas in general are not governed by hard rules, the "Oxford comma" is an extremely specific use of the comma: to separate the listing of 3 or more equal items. There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable.

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.

There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable.

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.

Actually, you're right. If one considers comedy to be a form of art, then being purposefully inconsistent with the Oxford Comma can create comedic ambiguity. Unfortunately the author seems to dismiss those sorts of sentences as contrived.

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.

On a tangent about consistency, I find it amusing when journalists slave themselves to the rules and create silly sentences. The one I'm thinking of is the convention that numbers under 10 are spelled out, and numbers 10 or higher are put in numeral form. Some journalists abandon consistency to stick to the 'rules': "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years". I think I've even seen it in hyphenated form, too.

The real reason for not using numerals is that in most typesets, and even how we learn to write them, they look like capital letters. This causes the reader to draw unnecessary attention to the numbers themselves in the same way which ALL CAPS might. "The five of us went skiing," vs. "the 5 of us went skiing" -- the number of skiers isn't interesting, the activity is the important part of that sentence and the number is secondary information.

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.

IMO there's another reason to use alphabetic-vs-numeral amounts: How you expect the audience to use the number.

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."

I am guessing that Cormac McCarthy would give you fits.

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.

Some sentences are down right unreadable without the Oxford comma, and others make perfect sense. I agree with the author that it's not always so cut and dry; we're not communicating with a computer after all ;)

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's a difference between throwing out all the rules, and throwing out merely the useless ones: splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and such.

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.

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