An Insult that’s a Compliment

Last panel. Nobody cares where the comma should go, right?

But that betrays the secret of good writing: if you do it right, nobody notices. The reader absorbs the content effortlessly. If you need to ask where a comma (or other punctuation, syntax, or grammar) goes, ask me!

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The Oxford comma is putting a comma before the last item (before the conjunction if the list has one) in a list of three or more. For example: one, two, and three. A lot of styles tell you not to put in that last comma. The excuse is that it saves space. (Humbug!) the problem is that without that comma you might be misunderstood sometimes. Here’s an example where you shouldn’t use that comma, because it’s not a list of three or more things even though at first glance that’s what it looks like. First panel:

The first item (Mom,) is direct address, so the other two words (Dad and Michael) don’t make a list of three, so no comma.

We English teachers/tech writers/curmudgeons have an informal rule:

Never separate a subject and verb with an odd number of commas. The way this sentence does:

Put no comma between “act” and “has”! Harrumpf.

I like my posts to have pictures, so here’s a picture from the movie that the essay containing the bad sentence is about:

You see both solecisms, right?

I don’t need to point out the misspelling and the misplaced comma, do I?

Here’s the comic:

His use of “appositive” is correct. “Rex” = “dog.” If he had more than one dog, he should get rid of the comma after “dog.”

But an incorrect double negative would normally have “don’t” instead of “doesn’t.” So is the double negative correct or not?