Are you on Team Oxford Comma or do you wish they could be plucked from every document? Do you bicker with editors or bosses about comma choices? Have you ever declared your comma preference in your bio?

First things first: it’s okay to have a preference. I have a preference too! I’m not interested in changing how you approach your personal communications. My goal is to help you understand why people have such strong opinions about this tiny little punctuation mark—and when you need to care.

What is the Oxford comma?

The Oxford comma, also called the serial comma, is the comma that comes before “and” in a series of three or more items.

These sentences include a serial comma:

I like books, board games, and crafts.
She dipped strawberries, apples, oranges, marshmallows, and pretzels in the chocolate fondue.

These sentence do not include a serial comma:

I like books, board games and crafts.
She dipped strawberries, apples, oranges, marshmallows and pretzels in the chocolate fondue.

Should you use the Oxford comma?

Yes.

Or no.

Wait, what?

If you're not an editor or a professional writer, you may remember learning a lot of rules in school. But one of the first things editors learn is that just as there's no such thing as “the dictionary” (there are many!), most “rules” are really style choices—and those can vary from field to field and country to country.

Style guides determine things like what kinds of dashes to use, when to use numerals or spell out numbers and, yes, whether to use the Oxford comma. A style guide isn’t about making rules. It’s about enabling consistency.

If you’re writing a novel in Canada or the US, your copy editor will likely follow The Chicago Manual of Style, which uses the Oxford comma. If you’re in journalism or communications in Canada, you likely follow The Canadian Press Stylebook, which doesn’t use the Oxford comma. (They’re less common in British English too.) I work with both of these style guides regularly, so it’s common for me to switch approaches depending on the client.

When in doubt, think of it this way:

If it’s for work and you have a style guide: follow the style guide
If it’s for work and you don’t have a style guide: pick an approach and be consistent (and then record it on a house style sheet!)
If it’s for leisure: consistency’s great, but hey, who’s checking?

Don’t listen to the memes

When you’ve been taught one system, it becomes more familiar. Maybe different constructions stand out as distractions while you read. That problem goes both ways, though. It’s important not to assume familiarity means clarity.

There are a lot of memes that show the preposterous misunderstandings that can arise from leaving out the Oxford comma. One of the more PG-rated ones is an apocryphal book dedication:

“To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

Did you laugh? Me too. It sounds like it’s saying Ayn Rand and God are the writer’s parents! Of course, it’d be pretty clear from context that that’s not the case, so it’s not really an issue of clarity here.

Here’s where I get annoyed.

People use this meme to insist that the Oxford comma always improves clarity. But the meme could just as easily “prove” the opposite. Consider this adjustment:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.”

Finally, an Oxford comma! But wait: now it seems to say that Ayn Rand is the writer’s mother. Oh dear.

Another meme suggests that the sentence “I had toast, coffee and orange juice” implies that the speaker consumed a blend of coffee and orange juice. It doesn’t. For it to mean that, “coffee and orange juice” would become one unit; let’s replace it with “juice” to make the problem easier to see. We would never say “I had toast, juice.” So “I had toast, coffee and orange juice” can only mean one of two things. Either the speaker consumed three items … or they’re speaking to some beverages (“Hey, Coffee and Orange Juice! I had toast!”). Nobody would assume the second (especially since the beverages aren’t capitalized as names would be); therefore, there’s no problem with clarity here—only with familiarity.

By now, I hope I’ve helped demonstrate how mix-ups can occur no matter which approach you choose. The examples in memes are silly, but confusion can arise in real-world cases. Here are two examples I created to reflect more likely scenarios:

“Amy visited her mother, a painter and a sculptor.”

The example above does not use the serial comma. Did Amy visit three people, or does her mother paint and sculpt? It’s impossible to say without more information.

“Amy visited her mother, a painter, and a sculptor.”

The example above does use the serial comma. Did Amy visit three people (mother and painter and sculptor) or two (mother who paints and a sculptor)? Again, we can’t say.

Preserving clarity with or without the Oxford comma

If misreading is possible either way, then the comma is not to blame!

Sometimes, simply adding (or removing) the comma will solve the problem. In fact, many style guides explicitly allow for exceptions when necessary for clarity.

But when the sentence is ambiguous either way, the best solution is often to revise. Here are some examples of possible revisions from the lines above.

Original: To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.
To Ayn Rand, God and my parents.
To my parents—and to Ayn Rand and God.

Original: To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.

To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.
To my mother—and to Ayn Rand and God.

Original: I had toast, coffee and orange juice.

I had toast, coffee, and orange juice.
I had toast and coffee and orange juice.

Original: Amy visited her mother, a painter[,] and a sculptor.

One person: Amy visited her mother, who is a painter and a sculptor.
Two people: Amy visited her mother, who is a painter, and a sculptor.
Three people: Amy visited her mother, as well as a painter and a sculptor.
Three people: Amy visited a painter, a sculptor[,] and her mother.

Are you convinced?

Like I said, I fully support your comma preferences! But I hope this has helped to dampen the comma controversy. It’s really quite an arbitrary argument: what is it about this little speck of a punctuation mark that people feel such an emotional connection to? After all, it’s rare to see bios where people profess their love for en dashes vs. em dashes.

So next time you see a meme insisting that there’s only one right way to structure your list, remind yourself that it’s only a style choice.