The Serial-Harvard-Oxford Comma

As many of you know, I’m a grammar nerd. I’m a lot less right brained (creative) than I’d like to be, and grammar rules excite me. My idea of a wild night on the town is to write a sentence fragment—as long as there is good reason for it.

So, as I wait for my characters in book 4 to tell me how they are going to resolve their first conflict, I figured I’d wax poetic about my favorite contentious grammar point: whether or not to use the serial comma, also called the Harvard comma or the Oxford comma. This is the comma that many style guides advise using before the conjunction (usually “and” or “but”) when you have a series of more than two items: apples, pears, and bananas; running, walking, or jogging; and singing, dancing, and acting. The last comma in each of these series is the serial comma.

Most newspapers and magazines do not use the serial comma; they write apples, pears and bananas. The original reason for that was to save space and reduce the effort—and risk of error—for typesetters. But today, a little less than half of U.S.-English writers and editors choose not to use the serial comma on principal (based on a 2014 Internet poll). Some go so far as to say it interrupts the flow of a sentence, although how one little comma can do that is beyond me.

For me, using the serial comma gives two wonderful gifts to readers: avoidance of confusion and maintenance of consistency. Obviously, in the example of “apples, pears and bananas,” readers know what I mean. But what if I write these phrases without the serial comma:

This is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God (not an original example, by the way): Is the dedication to three entities: my parents (1), Rand (2), and God (3)? Or is the dedication to my two parents, whose names are Ayn Rand and God? Of course, the argument can be made to flop the order (God, Ayn Rand and my parents), but maybe “my parents” are more important in this instance.

The vet held a party for the girls, Rover and Duke: Again, are there three groups of partiers: the girls (1), Rover (2), and Duke (3). Or did the vet’s party involve two girls named Rover and Duke?

For dinner, they like tuna, ham or peanut butter and jelly: What are the individual items? Tuna is the first, but is the second item ham or peanut butter, in which case, they like three things all at once, with the third being jelly? Or is this a choice of three items: tuna, ham, or peanut butter and jelly, the last being a combo?

I’ve heard the argument that writers should use the serial comma only when it can avoid confusion. That just hurts my consistency funny bone.

In my work-in-progress, tentatively named A New Heart, my hero and heroine use the serial comma, as does the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, from where I take my verses. Here’s a quick snippet of when Nathan and Sophia first meet (bold for the example of the serial comma):

He watched her do a quick once-over to check him out, and her originally open expression morphed into a practiced all-business look—pleasant but not especially pleased.

As he felt his brows knit, he looked down at himself. He was wearing his favorite three-piece charcoal-gray suit, a black shirt, and a fuchsia tie. It was his power suit, and he always thought he presented a fairly impressive picture in it.

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Let me know what you think? And what kind of comma do you call it?