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There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable. Is this written in the stars somewhere
by resu_nimda 12y ago
There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable.
Is this written in the stars somewhere? This is exactly the kind of prescriptivism the author is arguing against. If you fall more towards that side of the spectrum, that's fine, but don't believe you're somehow more factually correct. Your interpretations of consistency and readability are not universal.
- snowwrestler 12y agoActually, you're right. If one considers comedy to be a form of art, then being purposefully inconsistent with the Oxford Comma can create comedic ambiguity. Unfortunately the author seems to dismiss those sorts of sentences as contrived. Aside from that, I would contend that the vast majority of serial commas are incidental to artistic merit. If you're deciding on the Oxford Comma, you've already used at least one comma, and you're just deciding on the last one. That seems to me a pretty marginal decision.