People who care about grammar love the serial comma, aka the Oxford or Harvard comma. They love it because they were instructed to use it in school, and they love it because it supposedly reduces ...

I have finally realized that people’s beliefs about serial commas are as fierce as people’s thoughts on anchovies and reality shows. You either love them or hate them. No amount of arguing will ...

was a definition of a parliamentarian. There are times when you really don't want a serial comma. For instance, in poetry. A very good example is the line from Robert Frost. The woods are lovely, dark ...

Last week, hundreds of thousands of people around the US were reading and sharing a story about punctuation. On March 13, an appeals court in Maine said a state overtime law came down to a missing ...

DEAR RICHARD: The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is the comma used before the conjunction in a list of three or more items. For example: “I like to eat apples, bananas, and oranges.” I ...

“It was a typical Friday night at Costco in Corona. Customers, including an off-duty Los Angeles police officer, 32-year-old Kenneth French and his parents, waited in line for food samples.” How many ...

Serial commas made headlines a few weeks ago when a court decided that the absence of a serial comma made a law ambiguous. In this space last week, I begged to differ. But I didn’t have enough space ...

"It was a typical Friday night at Costco in Corona. Customers, including an off-duty Los Angeles police officer, 32-year-old Kenneth French and his parents, waited in line for food samples." How many ...

Time once again for a visit with our friend the comma. Or should that be our friend, the comma? Normal people don’t really care about the proper deployment of commas, but there are those of us who are ...

I have spent my career navigating between literature and journalism, trying to learn from both worlds. From my training and experience as an English professor, I carried into the newsroom the power of ...

Maria Kari is a freelance writer and journalist currently based in Vancouver, BC. "Who gives a [insert expletive] about an Oxford comma," asked the Vampire Weekend boys in 2008, shocking many an ...