Tuesday, June 19, 2018

commas - How to avoid confusion when "and" is in a list



How do I avoid confusion when "and" is in a comma-separated list?




E.g. "The guy eats, weighs a lot, and moves and jumps well."





If I don't use a serial comma, it would be:




E.g. "The guy eats, weighs a lot and moves and jumps well."




As you can tell it may cause some confusion when "and" is part of a list.


Answer



The practice of not using a serial comma when the last element is preceded by the word "and" often bothers me because these missing commas are very often spoken. When I read, I usually hear the printed text being spoken in my mind. So I would definitely add the serial comma, but as an editor I would not hesitate to add "he" to the third item in the series, which is to me a clause with a missing subject. Thus:




"The guy eats, weighs a lot, and he moves and jumps well."



Punctuation should be based not only on printed rules — the sound of the spoken words should also be a guide.


No comments:

Post a Comment