All grammar lovers are familiar with the great debate surrounding the use of the Oxford comma. For those of you unfamiliar with this ~special~ form of punctuation, here’s a bit about what it is and why you should use it in your writing.
About the Oxford Comma
Omitting it Can Cause Misinterpretation
A Real Life Example
This article was published in The New York Times a few months ago. Truck drivers from a dairy company in Maine sued the company for not compensating them for many years of overtime. Under Maine state laws, companies don’t have to provide overtime payment for certain job activities. When looking at the statement above, without Oxford comma, it appears that overtime rules do not apply to “packing… for distribution,” which is different than saying overtime rules do not apply to “distribution” – if added, the Oxford comma isolates “distribution” as a separate activity within the list not attached to packing. Truck drivers do the “distribution” but not the “packing for distribution,” so the law appears to state that drivers are entitled to overtime for their distribution. The court ultimately ruled that leaving out the Oxford comma led to significant ambiguity in interpretation and thus ruled in favor of the drivers. If there was a comma after “shipment,” it would have been clearer that the law did not apply to the distribution of food.
The Counterargument
The Oxford comma makes the phrase seem like an appositive phrase because of the punctuation. Appositive phrases are when you have two nouns side by side, with one noun used to identify the other (Bob Dylan identifies the noun grandfather).
Is the Oxford Comma “Boujee?”
My Take