Had my first meeting with Bobby’s third-grade teacher Friday. He’s doing well. But I noticed that on one of his tests, he was marked wrong for not using a serial comma. A serial comma, for those who don’t know, is the comma before the final "and" in a phrase such as "ham, chips, and eggs."
That’s right. It’s a fussy vestige of "proper" English that few people use anymore. You won’t see it in any leading newspaper, in almost any major magazine, and in few books outside of literary works. It will surely be history by the time Bobby reaches high school and becomes a full-fledged member of the texting generation.
But leave out a serial comma on a test in the California school system and you get points off, despite the fact that 95 percent of the culture is sending these kids a different message.
Absurd. As in: Wrong-headed, antiquated and futile.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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