Do you use the Oxford comma?
- I always use the Oxford comma.
- I never use the Oxford comma.
- Sometimes I use it. Sometimes I don’t.
- I have no idea what the heck you are talking about.
0 voters
I use it when I remember to. It adds clarity.
I use it only in ambiguous situations, which IRL don’t come up that often.
I made my sandwich with bread, butter and jelly. fine
I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty. needs comma
Yes, and I had no idea what Oxford Comma was.
It’s just the correct way to do it.
I do copyediting work, and any client who has expressed a preference wants it there. So not only do I get paid to use the Oxford comma, I get paid to make sure other people use it as well.
I always use one. I can’t even think of an example of a sentence which would be improved by choosing to not use one where it would appropriate.
I’ll borrow Just_Asking_Questions’s example: I made my sandwich with bread, butter and jelly. is a valid sentence. But I made my sandwich with bread, butter, and jelly. is clearer.
So, why not just always use it? That way, if you don’t notice that the sentence isn’t clear without it, no biggie. Seems easier to just always default to using it.
In theory, I might not use it in cases where using it could be confusing. But, in practice, I never actually encounter those cases. I can’t even recall offhand a contrived example where it was confusing.
I find it easier to read lists that use the Oxford comma. If I see a conjunction without a comma, I so often see it as part of list item, rather than a separator.
I like the Oxford Comma because it makes things clearer, but I also think it’s clunky. The comma is typically used to separate things. A simple “and” is a more elegant final separator than “, and”.
In the case where Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty are your parents, I actually think that it makes more sense for this situation to have a different kind of punctuation. Although it’s correct with the comma, I think the comma is an odd choice. I wish English had picked something different. Something like a colon seems more logical to me: “I love my parents: Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty”. If that was the correct way to write out that scenario, then there would be no ambiguity with “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty”, because the comma signals that the following things are independent. The only way to read the sentence would be that you loved three things: 1. your parents, 2. Lady Gaga, and 3. Humpty Dumpty. The Oxford Comma is a kluge to clear up the case which should have had different punctuation than a comma to begin with.
Because I was taught specifically not to use it, that it was unnecessary.* So it’s hard to get out of the habit.
My wife is a strong believer in the OC. We get into mock fights. But she crosses her 7s, so what does she know? 
*an indictment of the American education system? Or a revolution long overdue? You make the call!
She’s definitely classy and intellectual then.
That’s fucked up, man.
I sometimes use the Oxford Comma, when I write in English. I do it out of respect for your rules, and to mock them by using them (not that any of you will ever notice, it is my personal internal pleasure - neither guilty nor innocent). I don’t understand what aditional clarity it offers: any ambiguous example that I have been shown came across as splitting hairs or pedantic in my judgement. The Oxford Comma is not used in German or Spanish (or French or Italian or any other language I know even a little about), it would actually be considered an error, because it is superfluous.
I sometimes cross my sevens too. But usually I limit myself to a little serif-like squiggle on the upper left corner. Like that (without the circle). That is enough to avoid any confusion between 1 and 7. But sometimes I do both.
I use it only when necessary for clarity, as in the Humpty Dumpty/Lady Gaga example. Otherwise I think it’s superfluous and clutters the sentence.
I always use the Oxford comma because it matches the way I hear and speak sentences (out loud or just in my head).
“I make my sandwich with bread, butter, and jelly” has slight pauses after “bread” and after “butter.”
“I make my sandwich with bread, butter and jelly” has a slight pause after “bread,” but “butter and jelly” is all run together. Since “butter and jelly” isn’t all one thing, this sounds wrong to me.
All the years I worked in journalism and public relations, the default guide was the AP Stylebook, which specifically rules out the Oxford comma in most cases. Now that I’m retired, most of the people I communicate with do use the Oxford comma, so I gradually see it slipping into my own writing. But I suspect I’ll be dead before I finally resolve that in my own head.
If everybody used the Oxford comma all the time, then sentences like “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty” would have only one possible meaning and there would never be confusion.
I always use the Oxford comma, learned it in elementary school (mid-1970s) as that is the way the textbooks showed. Junior high I was getting “dinged” in writing class for an improper comma. Showed my elementary school teacher, a friend of the family, and she explained different publishers of textbooks followed different rules. McMillin textbooks different than Huffington maybe??
She contacted the principal of the junior high and found out that the writing teacher was new that year and didn’t realize students had been taught different than the rule she was following. Both styles were deemed to be correct and no points were to be taken off for the Oxford comma after that.
I got a letter from the White House once and it twice used the Oxford comma, which made me wince but delighted my wife, who’s a strong believer in the OC.
I was on the review committee for our college’s course descriptions, and we spent lots of time discussing commas, finally deciding on the Oxford style. Then someone decided that we needed to go back through previously written descriptions that had used a previous style. It was loads of fun.