When linking three or more elements, some writers place a comma before the "and": bell, book, and candle. That's known as the Oxford comma (or serial comma). Other writers don't use that comma: bell, ...

The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, is the one before “and” in a series of three or more: Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick,” “Billy Budd,” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It is also the ...

This is the first column in Comma Connects, an occasional series detailing the building of Comma, the nonprofit set to assume ownership of The Spokesman-Review in 2026, through the personal stories of ...

Example: I went to the beach, and I got a sunburn. The two independent clauses in this sentence are “I went to the beach” and “I got a sunburn.” The coordinating conjunction is “and.” Other ...

Writers frequently debate whether or not the Oxford comma is a necessary piece of punctuation. In an unlikely turn of events, a group of Maine dairy drivers have yielded the answer: Yes, it is. A case ...

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Surely, Oakhurst Dairy would have done well to heed the immortal words of the '80s hair band Cinderella: "Don't know what you got (till it's gone)." The milk and cream company based in Portland, Maine ...