Strand 3/Conventions – Post 6: Punctuation Variation: the Oxford Comma

At first, I didn’t think there was really anything interesting to say about the comma with items in a series, but I think it’s actually a good example of how we latch on to some of the early things we were taught, and then we stick to these things, often passionately, just because. Also, even if you’re not interested in this serial comma, the Common Core State Standards are. It shows up here for fifth grade: but is asterisked as one of those “Language Progressive Skills” that “are particularly likely to require continued attention in higher grades as they are applied to increasingly sophisticated writing and speaking.” They suggest revisiting this skill in grades 4-8. That seems really strange to me since it’s so straightforward. I guess it’s the lack of a clear yes or no/right or wrong strategy that bothers people.

So you know the scoop: there are two ways of writing items in a series, with either a comma before and or no comma before and (or other conjunctions).

The kid ate the bread with a peanut butter, jelly, and a banana.

It’s the comma after jelly that can either be there or not, depending on what your fourth grade teacher told you. That really seems to be how people decide - whatever they were taught first is what they stick to. So this comma is sometimes called the Oxford comma because Oxford University Press uses it - and they’re very fancy, so maybe that’s a good reason to go with it. Then again, those Brits do other funny things with punctuation, like put the “end punctuation” outside the quotation marks. (Wait, that actually makes a lot more sense.) So what do American style guides say? The Chicago Manual of Style recommends its use, while The Associated Press Style Guide (and therefore most journalistic writing) says to avoid it, unless doing so results in ambiguity. Consider the following sentence:

I went to the LSA meeting with Anne, a linguist, and a horseback rider.

This is ambiguous, of course, because it is not clear whether a linguist is an appositive describing Anne, or is the second person in a list of three different people. When we remove the final comma, we lose the possibility that a linguist is an appositive, but still have the possibility that we have three separate people attending the meeting.

I went to the LSA meeting with Anne, a linguist and a horseback rider.

And we now have the possibility that Anne is both a linguist and a horseback rider (and in fact, if you know Anne, she is), so there is ambiguity both with and without the final comma. We can, of course, change the wording to remove the ambiguity.

And this particular Anne and I are good examples of the two different acceptable standards here. I’m a consistent user of the Oxford comma, and Anne is a consistent user of the no Oxford comma. We write a lot of things together, so I put them in and she takes them out, or she leaves them out and I put them in, and then we have to wait for some copyeditor to make the call.

Let’s see, a good activity for this funny little punctuation rule is to go on an Oxford comma (or lack thereof) treasure hunt to see where it appears and where it doesn’t in published writing. And have your students look for the possibility of ambiguity as well. And if this wasn’t a blog targeted at middle school, I would provide you a link to the Vampire Weekend song “Oxford Comma,” but it might get you in trouble if you play it at school. (The first line of the song would have made a much better title for this post too.)

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 20 - Restrictive and Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses - and punctuation again

Relative clauses are clauses (so they contain a subject and a predicate) that describe, or modify, a noun. They fall into two classes, restrictive and nonrestrictive. The restrictive ones limit, or “restrict” what the noun refers to.

The realtor [who is selling our house] is really funny.
The place [where we love to go on vacation] is usually Orcas Island.
The child [who is juggling] wants to be in the circus.

So the bracketed clauses here pick out which realtor, place, and child.

Nonrestrictive relative clauses, on the other hand – though they might provide similar information – do not restrict the reference of the noun in the same way as restrictive relative clauses. In writing, nonrestrictive relative clauses are set off by commas, and you can also usually detect “comma intonation” in a speaker’s voice, distinguishing the two types.

restrictive: The PlayStation which we bought recently from a friend wasn’t too expensive.

nonrestrictive: The PlayStation, which we bought recently from a friend, wasn’t too expensive.

The restrictive relative clause, which (or that - I’ll come back to that) we bought recently from a friend, limits which PlayStation we’re referring to, to the one we bought recently from a friend. The non-restrictive relative clause, on the other hand, does not restrict the reference of the noun PlayStation; it isn’t information that distinguishes this PlayStation from other ones. That we bought the PS from a friend is simply extra, incidental information.

This difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive is really revealed when you have a noun that there is only one of - a proper noun. In that case, restricting that already singular set is weird, but using a non-restrictive clause is fine.

Hailey, who I saw on the bus yesterday, has a new graphing calculator.
??Hailey who I saw on the bus yesterday has a new graphing calculator.

This second sentence could only work if there is more than one Hailey and this is picking out the intended Hailey - the “on the bus Hailey” not the “next door neighbor Hailey” or something.

Activity. Identify the relative clauses in the following sentences and then determine whether they are restrictive or non-restrictive by putting commas around the non-restrictive ones. Many of them could be both, but the meaning would be slightly different. If that’s the case, briefly explain the difference.

The kid from your class who has that cool dog is walking towards us.
The store only allows returns that have the tags on and a receipt.
The sunglasses which I bought last month already broke.
Some gum is in my bag which is on the table.
The girl who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.
Sue who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.

There is a prescriptive rule of writing that suggests that which should be used with non-restrictive relative clauses and that with restrictive relative clauses. This rule, however, varies, by style guides and editors, and is also a fairly recent restriction. Both which and that are and have been common for centuries with restrictive relative clauses. Most speakers and writers would agree that it sounds odd, however, to use that in a non-restrictive relative clause; you probably wouldn’t write (or say)

Sushi, that I love, is on sale at the market.

MS Word seems to be reinforcing this rule, though. When its grammar checker finds which not preceded by a comma, it suggests the change to that. It’s not incorrect, however, to have which in restrictive relative clauses. British English conventions care even less about this. Oxford Dictionaries writes, “In British English, restrictive relative clauses can be introduced by that or which when they are referring to things rather than people.”

The coat that/which Dan had on yesterday was new.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about this debate - whether which should be used in restrictive relative clauses - can be found here.

It’s a question which you can think about and analyze for yourself. Sometimes I just think which sounds better (but Word has given me a green squiggle line for that last one!).

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 3: Punctuation clarifies – or doesn’t

The primary purpose of punctuation is to clarify, to help the reader understand the text. There are some common examples of how punctuation can disambiguate phrases and sentences that would otherwise be ambiguous.

Let’s eat Zelda.

With no comma this example, of course, means that we will eat Zelda. Simply add a comma and we are now addressing Zelda.

Let’s eat, Zelda.

The comma in the example above helps the reader to read the text in the way that is intended. Although the previous post discusses the fact that punctuation does not typically correlate with speech pauses, it often does correlate with intonation – the pitch across the string of words. And in examples like those above, the intonation distinctions in the spoken versions of these sentences would allow the listener to understand the words just as they were intended.

You can find plenty of other examples of changes in punctuation leading to changes of meaning – often unintended. I don’t even want to link to them since many of them are rants, suggesting the downfall of a society that doesn’t pay enough attention to punctuation, but if you’re so inclined, you may search. A few of the most prevalent examples are the one above (usually with Grandma instead of Zelda, the “dear John” example (ok, I’ll link to that one), and the panda joke, now also the title of a book by Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

A panda walks into a bar, sits down and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter dead. As the panda stands up to go, the bartender shouts, “Hey! Where are you
going? You just shot my waiter and you didn't pay for your sandwich!” The panda yells back at the bartender, “Hey, I'm a PANDA! Look it up!” The bartender opens his dictionary and sees the following definition for panda: "A tree dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.

So the punctuation in these examples certainly is useful, marking various kinds of phrases and clauses, resulting in different interpretations. (Though the panda one is really an artificial example since writers don't typically leave out that first comma between eats and shoots. Now, the so-called Oxford comma is a different story, which perhaps I'll return to.)

But sometimes punctuation is purely convention. It doesn’t mark grammatical distinctions or intonation contours or anything. But it’s conventional, so we do it. We learn to put a comma between a city name and a state name (Ferndale, Washington) and between the day of the month and the year (April 15, 2000), but wouldn’t these be just as easy for the reader to understand with no commas?

And capitalization – is that punctuation? We capitalize certain words by convention: proper nouns, of course, but also the pronoun I. Does capitalization of I serve to clarify? We’re accustomed to it as a convention, so it would be odd to us not to do it, but we don’t capitalize any other pronouns like She, They, or even the other first person singular Me. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?

And what about the apostrophe used in contractions? By convention, we put an apostrophe when letters have been deleted, so do plus not becomes don’t, but wouldn’t dont be just as clear in context?

Why dont you try it? Cant you read it just fine? Wouldnt it be easy enough?

Another example of punctuation as simply convention is the rule regarding end punctuation and quotation marks. The convention within the US is for all punctuation to go inside quotation marks, so it looks like the following example, with the period after okra preceding the ”:

The girl said, “I like okra.”

However, the convention in the UK is for the punctuation to go outside the quotation marks:

The girl said, “I like okra”.

One rule does not necessarily make more sense than the other and neither has anything to do with grammatical categories or with even clarity – it’s simply convention.

Such rules of punctuation are often lumped in to the study of “grammar,” broadly defined. However, these rules of writing do not depend on and are not affected by our spoken language or our unconscious (or conscious) knowledge of it. These “conventional” rules must be taught and learned, and are not the natural rules of language itself.

Ok, but on to the rules of punctuation that do correlate with grammatical distinctions.

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 2: Mini History of Punctuation

Early punctuation was more related to speaking than to reading. Latin texts were originally written without spaces between words. Punctuation marks began as a guide to reading texts aloud, and word spaces were finally introduced around the eighth century BCE. Early Old English texts needed marks to indicate when the speaker should pause to give emphasis or indications of where to breathe.

Because Old English texts were handwritten and because there were not yet any standards for punctuation at the time (800-1100), it is not surprising that there was great variability in the punctuation used. Although some scribes used no punctuation at all, most used the point (a period) to mark a rhetorical break of some kind or a suggestion for where to breathe when reading aloud. Points were written on the line or above the line. Semicolons indicated longer breaks, and punctus elevatus, looking something like our modern comma, marked a shorter break. Question marks (punctus interrogativus) were sometimes used, but not required, in questions.

Spaces occurred between words in compounds, between prefixes and suffixes and the roots or words to which they were attached, and sometimes between syllables. Prepositions, pronouns, and adverbs were typically attached to following words, and word breaks at the end of a line were often at syllable breaks, sometimes marked with a hyphen, sometimes not. Proper names were not capitalized, and although some scribes capitalized the first letter of the word beginning a sentence, not all did. Nouns were often written with the determiners and prepositions they formed constituents with.

It’s pretty cool to look at some old texts to see these techniques. Here’s one, The Leechbook of Bald, which was an Old English medical text probably compiled in the ninth-century, possibly under the influence of Alfred the Great's educational reforms. And here's a link to other Old English manuscripts.

It was not until the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century that we see the beginnings of the practices of modern day punctuation, which then became fairly codified by the 18th century. The British playwright Ben Jonson is often given credit for putting down many of the rules as we know them. In his 1640 book The English Grammar he discusses the primary functions of the various punctuation marks, marking the point at which punctuation correlates more with grammatical function of the words than with breathing patterns of speakers. In an 1892 book by John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, we see an acknowledgement of this shift.

It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions. Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would make nonsense. (John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)

What Hart said in 1892 still holds true, and teaching comma and period usage as correlating with pauses in speech can lead writers to make errors of comma usage. A study by Danielewicz and Chafe (“How `Normal’ Speaking Leads to `Erroneous’ Punctuation,” in S. Freedman, ed., The Acquisition of Written Language. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 213-225. 1985) reports on punctuation practices of college freshmen. They suggest that what might appear to be punctuation errors in freshman compositions are attempts to capture prosodic features of speech in writing. The writers seem to be punctuating to mark the intonation they would have used in speaking. Consider this example from the writing of one of the students in the study:

One of these categories, that I can be classified in is that of an only child.

Danielewicz and Chafe propose that the comma in this student's example indicates an intonation boundary. Such “errors” are likely reinforced from one of the only things that most students are taught about commas – that they mark pauses. In fact, most commas – one estimate says 70% – do not correlate with pauses in spoken language. We know that punctuation used to mark breathing pauses, but does not do so consistently anymore.

Ok, so commas and periods no longer correlate with spoken language pauses. What do they mark then?

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 1: Oh, Punctuation!

Punctuation is not linguistics (except when it is – see Geoff Nunberg’s The Linguistics of Punctuation). However, one of the primary concerns of many of the pre- and in-service teachers I work with is dealing with convention errors in their students’ writing – comma splices, fragments, and other usage errors (some are perceived errors, not actual ones, so I'll discuss that too). And there have been some requests from you to post some lessons related directly to punctuation, so here goes.

While I am obviously a strong advocate for taking time to delve into the study of grammar beyond its relation to punctuation, it is at least beneficial to better understand how the two relate to each other, and I've already alluded to this in some other posts (for example, this one on identifying clauses mentions fragments in writing). A brief investigation of the history of the punctuation, a better understanding of the various roles it has in our written language, and the ways in which standards of punctuation vary can all help students negotiate its use and will result, I’m certain, in fewer errors in writing.

Certainly knowledge of grammatical categories (like phrases and clause types) and certain grammatical functions (like modification) correlates with certain conventions; for example, to accurately punctuate complex clauses, one must know the distinction between subordinate clauses and coordinated clauses, or to accurately punctuate various kinds of modifying phrases, one must know whether something is a modifier or not. Now it is likely the case that the primary way we learn punctuation is by reading “accurately-punctuated” texts – but then there’s lots of variation there too (fragments are all over casual text and much fiction writing). Consider the fragments in this passage from Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch:

Inside, a tall, pale man dressed in black stood halfway down the hall, staring into a doorway. Beyond him, a dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn’t look like anyone had slept there in months. Dusty floor. Even before he’d started seeing Sintra, his place hadn’t looked this bad. (3)

So students will pick up on the fact that fragments are out there in "good" writing. It's all about making good rhetorical choices.