After having spent a powerful and moving week focusing on finding my voice and writing, writing, writing it was back to the old grind today. I have plenty more to share about the voyage of writing that I am on but first, a comma commercial.
Regular readers of this blog know the fixation I have with commas. (OK - well, there are just three of you that I can claim as regular readers but I am grateful to each and every one of you!) I post about them here and here and here. Bottom line - I have an obsession with commas.
So I just plain laughed out loud reading this post over at Poynter Online and his fight to retain the serial comma. My favorite line of the entire piece happens when Poynter reads his editor's writing and finds that she leaves in the serial commas she is constantly deleting from his work:
"So the editor who takes out my serial commas fights for her own. It's like being a Yankee fan married to a Red Sox fan. You can't win."
I am not sure where you stand on the issue of commas - but this piece sure does make you think about style!
2 comments:
The issue of the Oxford comma can be dividing, vexing, and tumultuous to those on all sides of this particular punctuation war.
Recently, I found myself at odds about comma placement with a woman from my writing group. She felt that my use of commas was superfluous, inconsistent, and trite; I felt that she was stingy, pompous, and misguided with the sparseness of her commas.
Luckily, our burgeoning battle was distracted by a fellow writer in the group who misused the semi-colon. She, the anti-serial comma woman, and I, the pro-serial comma woman, united in our shared goal to ensure that all semi-colons in all writing on the earth were employed correctly.
(Yes, Theresa, this post was a blatant attempt to include as many commas, Oxford commas and otherwise, as possible.)
:)
An obsession with commas... don't we all!??!
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