use the oxford comma


  

Use the Oxford Comma

 

You can have my Oxford comma
once you pry it from my cold, dead, and lifeless hands.

― Unknown, anonymous, and correct

 

Use the Oxford (Serial) Comma.

Thanks to internet memes and the general dissolution of societal civility, the Oxford Comma—and the arguments for and against using it—has found a greater audience.

There has been quite a bit of debate on the use (or non-use) of the Oxford, or serial, comma, but I feel strongly that we, as scientists, should always use it to minimize confusion in our oftentimes complicated writing.

What is the Oxford comma? Consider the following:

The flag of the United States is red, white, and blue.

The Oxford comma is the last comma used right after “white” and before the conjunction “and”. Many style guides, especially for journalists, do not require—and in fact disallow—the use of the Oxford comma:

The flag of the United States is red, white and blue.

In this particular case, you really don’t need that comma after white, so the anti-Oxfords have a point (and I certainly appreciate the efficiency of not including something that is not needed). However, there are cases where the lack of an Oxford comma may create confusion for the reader. For example, consider this photo caption for a film about Merle Haggard published in the Los Angeles Time on July 21, 2010:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

If you are familiar with Merle Haggard (as I am: I grew up in the country), you know that Merle Haggard was not married (at least in the biblical sense) to Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. If you are not familiar with Mr. Haggard, you might walk away thinking that Merle had gotten busy after gay marriage was legalized in the United States in 2015 and married and divorced Kris and Robert (you also might not know that Kris is a dude). Using the Oxford comma would have alleviated the potential misreading:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Duvall.

The interpretation of the law may hang on the use or non-use of the Oxford comma. For example, a dairy in Maine lost a lawsuit concerning overtime pay (Victor 2018) because the lack of an Oxford comma created ambiguity in the interpretation of the law:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

    (1) Agricultural produce;

    (2) Meat and fish products; and

    (3) Perishable foods.

The lack of the Oxford comma after “shipment” caused the problem and cost the dairy $5 million in overtime pay.

The Maine legislature later changed that sentence to

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment or distribution of:

thus (unnecessarily) employing the Oxford (or, more accurately, the series) semicolon but achieving the goal of reflecting the legislature’s (presumed) original intent[1].

Oxford commas can also be a matter of life or death. When Sir Roger Casement, an Irish revolutionary (Figure X), was accused of treason against the King of England, his conviction (and thus his life) hung (literally) on the absence of a comma in the following phrase from the Treason Act of 1351:

[A person was guilty of high treason if they] levied war against the King in his Realm or adhered to the King's enemies in his Realm, giving them aid and comfort in his Realm or elsewhere

Sir Casement’s attorneys argued that, because there was no comma after realm, he couldn’t be convicted of his actions since they occurred outside the King’s realm in Germany (he was caught while attempting to arrange an arms shipment to Ireland). However, the court, inferred that there should have been a comma there from the get-go and convicted him[2]. Sir Casement famously responded that he had been “hanged by a comma.” And so he was.

Some would argue that if a sentence requires an Oxford comma, perhaps it needs to be rewritten (not a bad thought); however, scientific writing can become unavoidably complicated. One thought process writers go through when deciding whether or not to use an Oxford comma is whether or not a sentence will confuse a reader. My question is: which reader? Assuming a normal distribution of reading skills (or perhaps propensity of confusion), how many readers is it acceptable to leave confused? 50 percent? 25 percent? 10 percent? How about none percent? You reach none percent by using the Oxford comma.

My advice to scientists: Always use the Oxford comma. Our sentences can get long and complicated, and since we are not English majors, we run the risk of not using one when we should have (not to mention that readers may have a different threshold of comprehension on the spectrum of where one should and shouldn’t use such a comma). If you always use the Oxford comma, you never have to think about whether or not you should use a comma, and you never have to worry about a reader misunderstanding what you write, at least with respect to the serial comma.

 

Figure 1: Sir Roger Casement, killed by a comma. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Roger_Casement_(6188264610).jpg)

 

copyright Robert E. Mace 2025 


[1] Legal and code punctuation tends to follow its own drummer.

[2] The Court noted that the modern translation of the original Norman-French text, should have included a comma. The original text was this: “Seignle Roi en le Roialme, donant a eux eid ou confort en son Roialme ou p aillours” or something like that. I don’t read Norman-French text, and the quote above uses characters I can’t find in my word processor.

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