Ah, the Oxford comma. Journalists often fight over it, academics love it and a lot of people don't care about or even know what it is. But this singular bit of punctuation is actually super important.

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare. It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, ...

When you're writing or typing and begin to list items in consecutive order, do you add a comma prior to the conjunction before the final item? Or not? The inclusion of that final comma is a great ...

Vampire Weekend posed that question in the opening line of the song “Oxford Comma,” from their 2008 debut album. Eleven years later, everyone on the internet seems to give a fuck—many fucks, a ...

If you’re looking for a grammatical convention guaranteed to spark an unnecessarily outraged debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [Editor’s note: I don’t know that I’d call it unnecessary].

Commas don't just signify pauses in a sentence — precise rules govern when to use this punctuation mark. Commas are needed before coordinating conjunctions, after dependent clauses (when they precede ...