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 ...

Let’s eat Grandma vs. Let’s eat, Grandma.” Classic middle school English teacher vibes. In all seriousness, though, these cornball axioms serve a purpose. Kenyon is a writer’s college by name, and we ...

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].

People who care about grammar love the serial comma, aka the Oxford or Harvard comma. They love it because they were instructed to use it in school, and they love it because it supposedly reduces ...

In school, I was taught about conjunctions (e.g. or and and) and the role they play in sentence structure – they are linking words. They do what they say on the tin: con-(i.e. with) and -junction (i.e ...

Editor’s Note: John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and music history at Columbia University and is the author of “Words on the Move.” The opinions expressed in this ...

CONFESSION: I've never cared that much about the Oxford comma. Some people call this the Harvard comma, or the serial comma, but what nobody seems to do is be indifferent to its use. This, Proponents ...