Jack Yesner Week 4- The Oxford Comma: A Personal Rebellion

  Last week, I was abruptly informed that I was not allowed to attend the extra AP Lang class and must attend a journalism class instead. I was deeply disconcerted and upset, as I would miss presenting my How to Read Literature Like a Professor project (a project I spent many hours on and the first ever art-based project I have been proud of) and miss the knowledge from other classmates’ presentations that I will need for an upcoming test. To make matters worse, I was forced to sit through a tedious lecture on the AP Writing Style, containing concepts any high school student taking a Journalism class should have known for many years. Sensing our Journalism class already knew the information, Mrs. Klein tried to challenge our knowledge by presenting the fact that the AP Writing Style excludes the Oxford Comma. This elicited no response from the exhausted class but evoked a silent rage within me.

The Oxford Comma, or serial comma, is a stylistic writing detail applied to lists that has traditionally been used by the Oxford University Press. In a list of simple objects (such as apples, bananas, and cherries), the Oxford Comma (as highlighted) separates the final two objects in the list. This can provide much-needed clarity to the reader. For example, in 2014, several Maine truck drivers sued the state because they did not believe they received proper overtime pay. They argued that the absence of an Oxford comma in the list of overtime pay exceptions made their pay unclear, and in 2018, a five million dollar settlement was reached in their favor. However, many institutions, including the AP, refuse to use the comma, insisting it is unnecessary. 

As Mrs. Klein strives to make the school newspaper as traditional and formal as possible, she is strictly abiding by the AP Writing Style. She even went so far as to proclaim that each individual error on our rough drafts would be a point off our grade. But when I am writing an article, I care more about whether it is easily understandable rather than stylistically correct. The sentence, “On the Shabbaton, the activities came primarily from Mrs. Delbo, a hypnotist and a rabbi” would insist that Mrs. Delbo is a hypnotist and rabbi, but having an Oxford Comma denotes that there were three separate initiators of activities. While it may hinder my ability to express what fully occurred, I plan to avoid using lists in my articles from now on, as I refuse to allow readers to suffer from interpreting unclear language all because of a stubborn stylistic decision.

Do you think the Oxford Comma should be used in the English language? Are there any other stylistic facets of the English language you disagree with or think should be changed?