Does the Oxford Comma increase readability?

Question

There are many puns online where not having the Oxford comma (Serial comma) can be interpreted as something other than intended, such as the infamous Sky News notification:

It’s hilarious, I know, but on a more serious note, does the optional serial comma have any effect on readability? Being a Swede, we don’t have that optional rule at all and your Swedish teacher would make you aware of the error and make you correct it. However, when I first found out about it, I thought it increases the readability and leaves out alternative interpretations.

I often find myself stuck with terrible lists, such as a global navigation. You may have Home, Products, Solutions, Services and Support and About Us. Now, do I mean

HomeProductsSolutionsServices and SupportAbout Us

or

HomeProductsSolutionsServices and Support and About Us

It’s obvious to us what I mean since About Us is a top navigation item of its own, but how about nonprofessionals who are not familiar with the standard patterns of a global navigation? Could they misinterpret what I really mean leaving the optional serial comma out of the question? Does the Oxford Comma increase readability?

Answer 1

I think the top-voted answer is only partially correct... The Oxford comma can resolve ambiguity OR create ambiguity, depending on context. This is the reason that grammar experts and style guides disagree on the use of the Oxford comma - sometimes the Oxford comma helps, sometimes it actually hurts readability. Consider the following examples...

"I gave gifts to my parents, Jim and Beth." In this example, the lack of the Oxford comma creates a serious problem! Is "Jim and Beth" an appositive describing my parents, in which case I've given gifts to only two people? Or is this a list of three independent items? There's no way to know. The Oxford comma clears it up, though... "I gave gifts to my parents, Jim, and Beth." Now all is clear! It's a list of three independent items!

Unfortunately, this can just as easily go the other way! Consider the following... "I gave gifts to my father, Jim, and Beth." In this case, the presence of the Oxford comma creates serious ambiguity. Is "Jim" an appositive describing my father, in which case I've given gifts to two people? Or is this a list of three different people, and Jim is not my father? With the Oxford comma there, we can't figure it out. But take away the Oxford comma, and it becomes very clear. "I gave gifts to my father, Jim and Beth." Ah! Now we know that three people were involved!

The Oxford comma does not universally increase or decrease readability. In some cases it helps, in others it hurts. The best practice is to consult the style guide for whatever you are writing for, follow its rules with respect to the Oxford comma consistently, and avoid crafting sentences where the Oxford comma or the lack thereof introduces a problem.

Answer 2

Yes. The Oxford Comma increases readability.

When items are logically separate, putting a delimiter between them makes their separation visually obvious. Without the delimiter, the separation can still be determined, but it is not obvious.

The Oxford comma removes the requirement that the reader figure out whether item n and item n-1 are logically separate.

EDIT:

I agree with this answer.

I want to clarify that I gave my original answer in the context of a list of items which are definitely separate, such as in the example in the original question. In such a case, I maintain that the Oxford comma does indeed increase readability.

However, many users have very helpfully pointed out that it's possible to construct a list wherein the Oxford comma may not help (and may even hinder) readability. Many of these are cases where the distinction is made by inflection when spoken, but that's of no use in text.

Here's my addendum:

If you find yourself in a situation where the addition or removal of the Oxford comma does not unambiguously improve readability, restructure the whole sentence.

Answer 3

I think the key is in how it sounds when read aloud.

When people read a sentence they normally "hear" it as speech with their internal voice (theories on this originally based on Lev Vygotsky's work, and there are even indications that this inner speech has an accent).

A comma translates to a pause in speech, so I think readability will be improved if the pauses are in the correct place.

For example, which would sound better to you when reciting a list of items?

• I had sausages < pause > bacon < pause > and eggs for breakfast.
• I had sausages < pause > bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Answer 4

In the olden days, the written word existed principally to allow reading out loud. The comma indicated that the reader should leave a very short pause before going on to the next word. That pause is almost imperceptible, but it affects the way the hearer understands what has been said. The Oxford comma is no exception.

Without that pause the list is subject to misinterpretation.

Answer 5

If I look specifically at your example of that list, I'd avoid using that type of serialization entirely, if at all possible. I'd use a simple unordered list and put those below each other in a text.

If you need to use inline serialization, you should try write your sentence to avoid the ambiguity entirely, or at least the serial comma. In this case, I'd use an ampersand (&) instead of the word and when talking about services and solutions in a text.

Answer 6

An ampersand rather than a comma would help solve this and work in menus and lists where commas wouldn't.

Ampersands are used as replacement for "and" with company names, common abreviations etc that are intended to be read as one phrase. So "Services & Support" is more clearly a single option than "services and support".

Of course if you're relying on this level of grammar-finery to make your navigation clear you probably have other problems....

Answer 7

Yes, the Oxford comma improves readability, but it's no panacea for careless or odd composition. Like any other great power, it can be used irresponsibly.

Some of these examples here are red-herrings, precisely because there are several good ways to improve understanding, regardless of the commas. There are problems you shouldn't try to solve with the Oxford comma. For instance, there's no confusion in "I gave gifts to my father, Jim and to Beth." Or, we're totally clear with "I gave gifts to Beth and my father, Jim." Why try to cram those sentences into a series of commas? Or again, why not use classifiers for everyone? Or, who cares what your father's first name is?

It's asinine to look for the Oxford Comma to solve all problems. But when used in a standard list of independent items, it does indeed improve readability. Just don't throw it around willy-nilly, without considering potentially better options, and then blame the poor Oxford comma.

(BTW, here's some gratuitous humor involving the Oxford comma, strippers, and Stalin. It's actually a pretty good example of a use-case where it clearly improves readability.)

Answer 8

Consult your company's style guide. In my own writing I always use it because I think it improves clarity. In my business writing I never use it because the companies I've worked for had style guides in place that specified not to use it.

Don't have a style guide? Not gonna make one? Then just pick a style and be consistent. (And have as many coworkers be consistent as possible.)

In your example, you could improve clarity without the serial comma by quoting each item: You may have "Home," "Products," "Solutions," "Services and Support" and "About Us." (Yes, the commas and periods go inside the quotes.)

Answer 9

Foremost, I think we need to recognize what an Oxford comma is. It's only used in the case of lists of at least three items. All of these use-cases about parents' names are absurd and wrong, regardless of your grammatical background. Your parents, Bob and Alice, never have commas after the first name. If it's a really big deal, you could replace parenthetical commas with actual parentheses or reorganize the sentence. Bob and Alice, my parents, won't get confused if you avoid the conjunction.

As far as readability goes, it's fuzzy. This discussion has involved numerous complicated sentence structures where it's complicated with or without the comma. Using it will not improve readability nearly as much as restructuring the sentence would. As we've found numerous examples to demonstrate, using the comma in a parenthetical phrase already enclosed in commas is going to be confusing. However, not using it will probably also be confusing because of so many commas nearby anyway.

Regarding the original example of headlines, an Oxford comma reduces ambiguity and it's probably a good idea to use it in such a case where list items might include conjunctions. However, it's not better in all cases and sentence structure will have a bigger impact if it's not a straight-forward list.

Answer 10

Objective evidence strongly suggests that the Oxford comma does not consistently and universally help readability. By this, I mean that there is a strong cross-Atlantic difference in the use of commas in general and the Oxford comma in particular: modern American editors use them much more often than modern British editors. (I have no idea what the rest of the English-speaking world does.) When I started reading British books as a kid -- I mean ones imported from Britain, not ones by a British author typeset here in the US -- I got confused by all the "missing" commas that I expected from American literature. But when I read literature where every possible comma is included in long sentences, I get confused by the "extra" commas. British readers on the whole, I imagine, get confused if there are more commas than they were used to seeing when they learned to read and generally prefer the versions without Oxford commas the same way I prefer versions with them.

If one style of comma usage were universally superior, style guides in Britain and the US would long ago have come into line as editors became frustrated by years of "hard-to-read" text.