Saturday, March 18, 2017

When was the last time that an article on punctuation made the front page of the NY Times? Well, in this case, the lack of an "Oxford comma" cost a company in Maine millions of dollars. What's an Oxford comma? If you have a sequence of three or more things, then in a, b, and c the comma after b is the Oxford comma. Some people, you see, would punctuate it like this: a, b and c. Well, a contract dispute between a trucking company and its employees cost the company several million dollars because it had to pay some truckers extra retirement money because they were included in its retirement plan. They wouldn't have been included had the Oxford comma been used. So remember: always write a, b, and c.