“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

Wednesday is National Grammar Day, a time to celebrate good writing, strong syntax and proper punctuation. Grammar nerds likely cringed at that last sentence. It all depends on your feelings about the ...

The minor yet highly controversial issue of the Oxford Comma (or serial comma) arises solely in one very restricted context: what is known in classical grammar as a Ideally, it should be the writer’s ...

A few weeks ago, I mentioned in this space that serial commas, also called Oxford commas, are a matter of style. So either “red, white and blue” or “red, white, and blue” can be correct depending on ...

I hate the serial comma: the final comma in a series, e.g., “this, that, and the other thing.” The one after “that” is the serial comma. Associated Press style, and the style at most newspapers, is to ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Yesterday, Mediabistro's GalleyCat ran a post that made it seem like Oxford University Press was dropping the use of its eponymous comma, also known as the serial comma. The story took off and became ...