{"id":92,"date":"2013-10-15T15:41:17","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T15:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/?p=92"},"modified":"2013-10-15T15:41:17","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T15:41:17","slug":"why-the-serial-comma-helps-and-why-its-not-sufficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/2013\/10\/15\/why-the-serial-comma-helps-and-why-its-not-sufficient\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the serial comma helps, and why it&#8217;s not sufficient"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across\u00a0the following perfect example of\u00a0the importance of the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Serial_comma\" data-blogger-escaped-target=\"_blank\">serial comma<\/a>, in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/how-a-telecom-helped-the-government-spy-on-me\" data-blogger-escaped-target=\"_blank\">a ProPublica article<\/a>\u00a0describing a problematic data leak:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Under the serial comma convention, the phrase &#8220;Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife&#8221; describes a single person under three descriptions \u2014 a proper name, a professional post, and a personal connection. With the extra comma, &#8220;Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia, and my wife&#8221; would describe three distinct people.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately,\u00a0since it&#8217;s not clear whether ProPublica always follows the serial comma convention, the version without the extra comma is ambiguous. (I even looked for a ProPublica style guide that might clarify their house style on the matter.) For that reason, when I first read the sentence, I actually could not easily determine whether the one referent or three referent interpretation was intended. The solution for the careful writer: Always use the Harvard comma where appropriate, and in cases such as the above, rephrase the sentence to disambiguate:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, who is the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across\u00a0the following perfect example of\u00a0the importance of the\u00a0serial comma, in\u00a0a ProPublica article\u00a0describing a problematic data leak: The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/2013\/10\/15\/why-the-serial-comma-helps-and-why-its-not-sufficient\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ggVW-1u","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/groundtruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}