Saturday, October 31, 2009

Commas in Lists

Isn't that last comma in a list still required? Isn't it, for example: "Chris, Dan, and Dave", rather than "Chris, Dan and Dave"? Or has this rule fallen prey to the dumbing down of our language?

Ain't it ever gonna stop?

2 comments:

Dan said...

I, unfortunately, vacillate on how the rule is, but, yes, I think there should be a comma right before the word 'and'.


I had an administrator asking me recently:

You want to ask the question "Do you put a period after the quotation marks or before the quotation marks in a sentence like this?".

I told him that the period should go after the quotation marks, though I'm not totally confident about what the hard and fast rule is. Feeling as though I should be the one with answers about these kinds of things in our school can be vexing at times...and exciting at the same time.

Christopher said...

I recall that the rule is/was that punctuation goes INSIDE the quotation marks. I however refuse to do so unless the punctuation is part of the quotation itself--but then I got a degree in math, not english.