grammar – Treehouse Writers

I have a confession. I don’t care about the Oxford comma.

It’s OK with me if you want to use it. It’s also OK with me if you want to follow what I think of as the newspaper rule (because it’s in the AP stylebook) and only use it if the sentence would otherwise be confusing.

For those who are not of the writing or editing professions and who do not follow the heated debates about this issue on Twitter, the Oxford comma is the comma that appears just before “and” or “or” in a list of three or more items. It’s also called the serial comma.

Under the newspaper rule, you generally don’t put a comma there.

Here’s a sentence with the Oxford comma:

I like persimmons, strawberries, and grapefruit.

Here’s the same sentence without it:

I like persimmons, strawberries and grapefruit.

As far as I’m concerned, either version is fine. There’s no confusion either way.

Generally, the only sentences where you need to deliberately include or omit that comma are ones where the words divided by the “and” could be taken as describing the previous words.

So for example:

“I only go to the movies with my cousins, Dick, and Jane” does not mean the same thing as “I only go to the movies with my cousins, Dick and Jane.”

In the first sentence, “cousins,” “Dick,” and “Jane” are all separate categories. In the second, Dick and Jane are the names of my cousins.

If you mean the first, you need that final comma. If you mean the second, that final comma is wrong.

Actually, this rule isn’t really about commas. It’s about the fact that sometimes something that looks like a list isn’t. And if it’s not a list, then you need to use commas differently. Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Commas and Rules”…

Google Docs and I do not have the same understanding of grammar. I know nothing about the skills of whoever programmed the Docs algorithm, but since I learned grammar from my mother, who was a great copy editor, I have a great deal more faith in my opinion than I do in theirs.

Here is an example of a sentence where Docs wants me to change the words “is more”:

Why do we believe
the solution to violence
is more violence?

Maybe the reason is simply that I’m using the haiku form to write that sentence, because the blue line under “is more” disappears when I write it without line breaks.

I should note that the blue lines appear whenever Google Docs finds something “wrong” even though I have “suggest changes” turned off. Apparently you can’t really turn off “suggest changes.”

Here’s another line from one of my daily senryu:

Build your healthy life.

Docs doesn’t like my use of “your.” Since that is a perfectly good imperative sentence, I do not understand it. This one isn’t related to the formatting; Docs marks something wrong either way.

Docs also doesn’t like my use of “doesn’t” as a verb in the first sentence of that last paragraph, since Docs looks like a plural even though I am using it as the name of a program, which makes it singular. Docs is also inconsistent in its application of this rule, because it has no objection to the “is” in this sentence.

I had thought that capitalization of Docs alerted the algorithm to the fact that I was using it as a proper name (for the very program I’m writing about). When it objected to “doesn’t,” I thought the problem was that it was the first word in a sentence and the algorithm couldn’t tell whether I meant docs in general or Google Docs.

But the lack of objection to “is” destroys that theory. Now I don’t know what the hell it’s doing. Continue reading “Algorithmic Grammar”…