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I don’t see a need for this final comma. A comma can leave many addlepated, confused and can make us misread sentences. Again, we’ll need to understand oxford commas.
Oxford commas are the commas after the penultimate or second to last word or sentence fragment in a list. In the second sentence of this essay, you can notice the lack of one after the word “confused.” Most people would have put an Oxford comma there absent-mindedly.
For example read this sentence aloud: “My cat is beautiful, amazing, and the best.”
Did you pause after amazing? Read it again. You might have, but you aren’t supposed to. Now read: “My cat is beautiful, amazing and the best. I shall go to worship him/her.” They sounded exactly the same, didn’t they? If you need more proof, try using a text to voice app or website. To save you some time, I tried this experiment on a few websites where they all sounded the same.
The point of commas is to inform people of where to pause their speech in a sentence. If that is news to you, reread this sentence aloud. So why would we have a comma in a sentence that doesn’t do its job? In a listing sentence, the other comma does its job. An Oxford comma is just a deadbeat comma.
Why did we ever use these commas in the first place? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter H. Sutcliffe’s 1978 book The Oxford University Press: An informal history. To hear a more in-depth history I suggest the article Origin of the Oxford comma by Jasso Lamberg. (If you wouldn’t mind telling me if that’s a link through the chat function, that’d be helpful.) As for the name, it can also be known as the Harvard comma, as Oxford and Harvard are two organizations that supported it.
We need commas, they help us craft sentences. You may have noticed I’ve uploaded two essays to this website today. Hopefully, you clicked on this one first. The other essay is titled “Read What Are Oxford Commas First.” It is a compilation of my essays, but all commas are removed. It’s incredibly hard to read. So, commas are important, they do a lot for us. With the exception of the unnecessary oxford commas.
Isn’t punctuation supposed to help us understand each other? Aren’t we always searching for a quicker, easier way to communicate? We use punctuation to make things go faster, so the reader doesn’t have to take time to basically add in the use of punctuation. All of our other uses of punctuation are common sense. To help us show emotion, to end a thought or to separate our writing from someone else’s. So why have a comma slowing us down and not doing its job? Why have an unnecessary mark? If we don’t have the time to write out you or are, why do we continue to use this useless character?