I Hate Present Tense, but I love Oxford commas

I recently bought a book I’ve been looking forward to reading. Then I realized, to my dismay…

It’s written in present tense. Not She said, but She says. Not he walked into the room, but he walks into the room.

It’s like trying to read a 90,000-word joke… “A priest walks into a bar…”

But part of being a writer—and a reader—is learning to ride the wave of current literary trends. Because this shit changes, y’all. Accepted norms of language and grammar and spelling do change over time. This situation causes serious chafing for some of us who cling to the rules we have adhered to for our whole lives. But we can’t trust the rules we learned, because they’ve been shot through with willful ignorance until they’re about as readable as a thin slice of Swiss cheese.

It’s not exactly fair, but we rule-followers must make peace with the fact that the rules we learned are often abandoned to accommodate those who couldn’t be bothered. The rules are relaxed to cater to the lowest common denominator. Folks who spent their elementary school career staring out the window refuse to learn the rules, so yeah, let’s just quit enforcing them.

That happens more than I’d like.

Take, for example, the lowly comma. I learned that commas are used to control the reader’s pace, to give them time to digest one section of a sentence before moving on to another, and to increase understanding when the absence of a comma would be confusing. (“Let’s eat Rupert” isn’t the same as “Let’s eat, Rupert.” Commas save lives, y’all.)

But suddenly it seems like commas cost more money than publishers can afford, so the old-fashioned Oxford Comma—which I love—has gone out of favor., even though it is often necessary for understanding.

Professional copyeditors remove Oxford commas from my manuscripts because, in theory, most of the commas we’ve been taught to use aren’t necessary. But in practice, many commas that copyeditors remove must be put back in because they are necessary for understanding. The presence or absence of commas can completely change the meaning of a sentence.

I love my husband, my kids, and my dogs. This construction uses an Oxford comma before the last item in the list to separate each item—husband, children, and dogs, into separate entities.

vs.

I love my husband, my kids and my dogs. This construction could lead the reader to think that my dogs are my children. (Which, okay, is sort-of true now that our kids are grown.)

Here’s a better example:

She is a successful businesswoman, a loving wife, and mother of three boys.

vs.

She is a successful businesswoman, a loving wife and mother of three boys. (Polygamy and pedophilia, really? Wow.)

Or how about this one:

On our vacation to Rome, we met the Pope, a talented master chef, and an aging porn star.

vs.

On our vacation to Rome, we met the Pope, a talented master chef and an aging porn star. (Honestly, I didn’t know the Pope had it in him. Did you?)

Language changes over time. New words are born while old words wither and die. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some grammar rules were created for good reason. Lazy readers and writers have caused editors and copyeditors to decide that we can dispense with the rules some people can’t be bothered to learn.

And let’s face it, the AP style manual (the rulebook that dispensed with the Oxford comma) is specifically geared to cater to people who read on a third-grade level, to help them understand the most basic news and magazine articles. The bar was already pretty much in the dirt, even before the grammar gurus at the Associated Press dug a trench to bury it in.

The Oxford comma is still a hotly debated subject in the copyediting world. But when you look it up (seriously, just Google Oxford Comma Debate), you’ll see that the most current remedy for the controversy is that either style of comma use is accepted, but you should choose one or the other and stick to it.

Well, now, it’s up to you whether you’re on board for pedophilic polyamory and porn star popes or not. I don’t want to be a prude, but I think I’ll stick to using the Oxford comma.