I have three blogs and am constantly amazed at the difference in the “hit” rate. But that’s a story for another day. The Wordpress.com News blog had a link today to an article on getting more page views for your blog - something that’s relevant to one of my blogs. However I became entranced with the March 22 post on the Oxford Comma . Despite loving English, I had never heard of this – a comma that is optional before the “and” at the end of a list. Whenever I’ve felt the need to use such a device, I resort to the use of semi-colons as I was taught to do in primary school! The Oxford Comma looks so wrong to my eyes, but the example given really tickled my fancy:
“Leaving out the final comma in a series can also cause ambiguity, often to humorous effect. Consider these examples I’ve borrowed from the Wikipedia article on the serial comma:
- To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
- Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.”
