Who Wins in This Comma War?. Hey, you’re a creative writer — you… | by Carolyn V. Hamilton | ILLUMINATION | Jul, 2025
Hey, you’re a creative writer — you can’t concern yourself with silly things like punctuation, right? LOL.
What is the correct way to use commas in lists?
This is a frequently asked question I hear from my aspiring memoir writers.
Commas do important work.
They are there to help us prevent misunderstanding in a sentence.
Remember, Woman, without her man, is nothing, and Woman, without her, man is nothing.
In the second book in my MEMOIR TO LEGACY collection, Power Editing for Memoir Writers, I wrote:
With the word “and”, either comma placement in red, white, and blue and red, white and blue is acceptable today.
The comma before the “and” is called an Oxford/Serial/Series/Harvard Comma.
And it’s optional.
Having said that, I prefer to use the two commas. I use the optional comma to establish greater clarity in my writing.
Now, why should I care about an Oxford comma?
From this insightful article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma comes the following information:
Here’s an example that’s ambiguous without the comma…
