Divided by a comma

Attorneys deal with laws for a living. Bureaucrats work with regulations. Restaurateurs contend with heat, spice and the irregularity of natural ingredients. I work with words and, occasionally, punctuation.

One of the small but persistent details I run into daily is the long-running battle over the so-called serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma or the Harvard comma. It is a debate that refuses to die, largely because many of us were taught one way, then later discovered that the rules had quietly shifted.

In the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in private and parochial schools, English instruction was still grounded in what linguists call “prescriptive English”—a rule-driven approach shaped not only by early American norms but by much older European traditions. Grammar was taught less as a tool than as a discipline. Diagrammed sentences were closer to logic or mathematics than self-expression; something to be mastered, not negotiated.

Those textbooks trafficked in absolutes. Do not split infinitives. Do not end sentences with prepositions. Do not put a comma before the final conjunction in a simple series. I was taught, without ambiguity, a no-serial-comma rule rooted in traditional grammar: the comma was treated as functionally equivalent to “and” or “or,” so using both felt redundant—almost illogical, like saying “and and.”

Interestingly, we were also taught not to begin sentences with “and” or “but,” a rule that has quietly faded, though some readers of a certain vintage will cringe when it appears.

Meanwhile, the serial comma did exist, but it lived elsewhere. It was standard in book publishing, reinforced by The Chicago Manual of Style, which mandated it for clarity. Editors used it. Authors rarely thought about it.

The shift came quietly in the late 1980s and 1990s. Chicago-style editing moved beyond book publishing into institutional reports, grant writing and other academic-adjacent work. Alongside this, higher education placed greater emphasis on standardized writing systems (APA, MLA, etc.)—uniform rules for footnoting, citations and sourcing that could be taught, enforced and replicated across disciplines. Those systems existed first to organize evidence and attribution, not to settle debates over commas, but once writing itself became standardized, expectations about punctuation followed. The practical effect was a gradual shift away from “never use it” toward “use it unless you have a reason not to.”

Newsrooms, however, never fully embraced the serial comma because it solved problems journalists rarely faced and introduced complications they preferred to avoid. Journalism developed under tight space constraints and unforgiving deadlines, where speed and consistency mattered more than stylistic refinement. The approach codified by Associated Press reflected that reality.

As academic and institutional writing gradually normalized the serial comma, journalism largely held its ground. The result today is an uneasy coexistence. While the serial comma remains outside standard news style, its use in the broader writing world has become common enough that grammar and editing tools often default to it. General grammar tools flag its absence and AP-aware tools often miss it. The result is a low-grade randomness that produces an odd amount of angst for a very small and very particular audience.

Perhaps that is the real lesson. The serial comma is neither hero nor villain. It is a reminder that rules change, often quietly, and that writers who cross disciplinary borders sometimes have to become bilingual. In the end, clarity still matters most, whether it comes from a comma or from rewriting the sentence entirely.