They're wrong. A good sign of this, is the distain this deeply politicised snarky rule is being treated with, by the British public and the NHS staff who can see it for what it is: performatively useless.
If they'd said they wanted more plain English it might have had some support.
The amount of ink and paper consumed defending it, will exceed the savings. Next, they'll be arguing the colon and apostrophe shouldn't be used.
The same way we punctuate “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”.
More seriously, if following a grammatical rule causes confusion you can choose to ignore the rule (or, as would be the sane choice in the Buffalo situation, evade the rule by rewriting to avoid the issue).
General rule: don’t use the comma. If the sentence is ambiguous to the reader in a specific case, then either: add a comma, or rewrite your sentence to be less confusing.
I definitely use both deliveries in speech depending on the context, usually adding in the final pause when it helps disambiguate.
For example, “Apples, oranges and pears” the “and” has the about the same count as the pause after “Apples”; pausing before the “and” feels like a stutter.
I think most programmers can agree that the fewer special cases there are, confusion and overhead is also reduced. Always using the comma reduces a whole area of decision making where one needs to decide if it’s needed or not in every special case.
Agreed, and besides the broader point, considering this is a writing style guide, is to avoid ambiguous/awkward statements altogether.
If this sentence was describing places you shouldn’t visit as an example, a bullet point list would probably be more appropriate. So in a more context-appropriate example this would probably be rephrased as
This disease is found in the following areas:
* Jamaica
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Turks and Caicos
Now I’m not arguing if this particular style guide is a good idea or not - but I can see why you might want to avoid the original statement which was quite hard to parse with confidence.
Having never heard of "Turks and Caicos" the sentence was quite difficult to parse in my opinion. I happen to have heard "Antigua and Barbuda" as a single place name at some point but even then I wasn't entirely sure until I saw your explainer.
All confusion could be removed by a few commas, I don't see why you wouldn't add those.
The sentence already has the Oxford comma, and it appears it didn’t prevent your confusion. If the commas are not effective at their job, I don’t see why one would add them.
People aren’t robots. Not enforcing the Oxford comma doesn’t mean you mindlessly write ambiguous sentences.
Style guides that don’t use the Oxford comma will suggest either: adding the comma where necessary to avoid confusion, or rewriting your sentence to be less ambiguous.
That is sensible, but I still don't understand why people take a stand against the comma. Is saving a single tiny character that important even if it is not ambiguous to leave it off? Why would people recommend against its use?
Inconsistency creates confusion as well. If there isn't an example of the Oxford comma increasing ambiguity, I see no reason it shouldn't be used every time.
I agree that people aren't robots, but I disagree with the conclusion. People write ambiguous sentences very often, and I certainly appreciate a very simple rule that avoids needing people to pay mindful attention to list ambiguity.
What is the benefit to not having the oxford comma? Is there a tradeoff I'm missing here, or are people advocating to avoid it simply on the basis of "I don't like it"?
Some people are against the Oxford comma being mandatory, like me.
I would punctuate your phrase exactly as you did. And at the same time I wouldn't use it in situations where there's no benefit. You, just like all other grammatical devices
I can't read that sentence no matter where you put the commas, I thought there were 4 entries until I spelled it out to make this comment and wondered why my list was short.
This is just some divisive noise to distract from whatever policy it is they're trying to hide today. 6.8 million people are on an NHS waiting list at the moment, but the government doesn't seem too concerned about trying to fix that.
Note that this was only an internal memo with advice for staff on how to write to the new Health Minister, no a directive on how to communicate with public or patients.
This is notes from an incoming conservative minister to the party or civil service staff that work for the department. Before "keeping a close eye on linked in" comes to much they'll probably be gone due to a minor scandal, moved in a reshuffle caused by a more significant scandal, or due to yet another change at the top bringing in a nearly all new team (a prime minister lasting 18 months without a leadership challenge is not all that common at the moment).
If my boss sent me a memorandum about arbitrary grammar preferences, I'd think he either didn't respect my time or thought I was an idiot. If it's so important, then the officials should be leading by example, not browbeating their underlings
With Spanish being my first language, this confused me to no end. I constantly found myself reviewing my uni assignments to add a comma before the last item of a list.
This, that, and that other thing.
which I would write as
Esto, eso y eso otro.
...In Spanish. Never really put any effort in understanding why, I just took it on face value and now I know.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] threadIf they'd said they wanted more plain English it might have had some support.
The amount of ink and paper consumed defending it, will exceed the savings. Next, they'll be arguing the colon and apostrophe shouldn't be used.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/16/therese-cof...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/15/coffey-urge...
It's a bit embarrassing that the NY Times didn't refer to its own article on the subject.
More seriously, if following a grammatical rule causes confusion you can choose to ignore the rule (or, as would be the sane choice in the Buffalo situation, evade the rule by rewriting to avoid the issue).
General rule: don’t use the comma. If the sentence is ambiguous to the reader in a specific case, then either: add a comma, or rewrite your sentence to be less confusing.
For example, “Apples, oranges and pears” the “and” has the about the same count as the pause after “Apples”; pausing before the “and” feels like a stutter.
"We're having hot dogs, hamburgers, and peanut butter and jelly.
Especially in a medical setting where the aesthetics of a sentence are not close to as important as clarity.
Humans are quite decent at parsing ambiguous text, you'll find.
If this sentence was describing places you shouldn’t visit as an example, a bullet point list would probably be more appropriate. So in a more context-appropriate example this would probably be rephrased as
This disease is found in the following areas:
* Jamaica
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Turks and Caicos
Now I’m not arguing if this particular style guide is a good idea or not - but I can see why you might want to avoid the original statement which was quite hard to parse with confidence.
All confusion could be removed by a few commas, I don't see why you wouldn't add those.
If we were guaranteed that Oxford commas would always be used then there would be no confusion.
Style guides that don’t use the Oxford comma will suggest either: adding the comma where necessary to avoid confusion, or rewriting your sentence to be less ambiguous.
What is the benefit to not having the oxford comma? Is there a tradeoff I'm missing here, or are people advocating to avoid it simply on the basis of "I don't like it"?
Some people are against the Oxford comma being mandatory, like me.
I would punctuate your phrase exactly as you did. And at the same time I wouldn't use it in situations where there's no benefit. You, just like all other grammatical devices
We visited:
- Jamaica
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Turks and Caicos
I can't read that sentence no matter where you put the commas, I thought there were 4 entries until I spelled it out to make this comment and wondered why my list was short.
This, that, and that other thing.
which I would write as
Esto, eso y eso otro.
...In Spanish. Never really put any effort in understanding why, I just took it on face value and now I know.