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All about the Oxford comma, including when it may or may not be necessary.
Some people use the Oxford comma (also known as the Harvard or serial comma). This is a comma before "and" or "or" at the end of a series, regardless of whether it is needed for clarification purposes. For example: X, Y, and Z (with an Oxford comma) X, Y and Z (without an Oxford comma)
The comma operator separates expressions (which have value) in a way analogous to how the semicolon terminates statements, and sequences of expressions are enclosed in parentheses analogously to how sequences of statements are enclosed in braces: [1] (a, b, c) is a sequence of expressions, separated by commas, which evaluates to the last expression c, while {a; b; c;} is a sequence of ...
"Avoid the so-called Oxford comma; say 'he ate bread, butter and jam' rather than 'he ate bread, butter, and jam'." The Economist Style Guide [49] "Do not put a comma before and at the end of a sequence of items unless one of the items includes another and. Thus 'The doctor suggested an aspirin, half a grapefruit and a cup of broth.
A stylistic depiction of values inside of a so-named comma-separated values (CSV) text file. The commas (shown in red) are used as field delimiters. A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters for specifying the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text, mathematical expressions or other data streams.
Commas are placed between items in lists, as in They own a cat, a dog, two rabbits, and seven mice. Whether the final conjunction, most frequently and, should be preceded by a comma, called the serial comma, is one of the most disputed linguistic or stylistic questions in English: They served apples, peaches, and bananas. (serial comma used)
The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within a sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but ...
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. [1] English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; [2] and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. [3]