Rules vs. Style, & the Oxford Comma

There's a steadfast grammar book floating around called Strunk and White's Elements of Style. In addition to my favorite grammar blogs, Grammar Girl and Grammar Bytes!, Elements of Style helps present grammar with the leeway for our own personal flair.

Even in formal writing, our voice should be dominant in the sea of quotes, paraphrases, and information. Style is how we bring our voice forward. The punctuation, sentence format, and words we choose are what makes up our style. The more we write, the more comfortable we'll feel in our new paper skin. We'll see our style.

The important starting point with style is to know the rules (that might sound counter intuitive, but trust me!). The better we know the expectations of our readers, the more efficiently we can play with our style to guide the reader through our thoughts. It's like learning how to use a laser cutter so you can finally make that personalized lightsaber. :) The tools let us properly build what we see in our heads. 

Rules and style also present a great opportunity for me to talk about my FAVORITE comma of all time: the Oxford Comma!

To be a pirate, you must know the "guidelines."

There are grammar rules, and then there's style. Grammar is meant to be the system side of writing--the set of rules that create logical structure. Of course, anyone who's experienced the blissful fun of grammar knows there's a lot, A LOT of grey area, but the idea remains: grammar rules should be followed. 

Style, on the other hand, has more to do with the rules of specific aspects of writing, and the individual voice. It's interested in the nuances of language usage in specific areas, creating a level field out of what works best for that group. For instance, Turabian's Manual for Writers is a style guide. It offers the style consistencies for those primarily in historical and biblical research fields. 

So is it right or wrong?

Some style guides, like the MLA Handbook and Turabian, tell us to use the Oxford Comma (Yay!), which means adding a comma before the last element of a list:

I packed the essentials for my camping trip: Lord of the Rings, Wuthering Heights, A Farewell to Arms, and the Picture of Dorian Grey.

But others, like the AP Stylebook, which is used to format press media, tells us NOT to use the Oxford Comma: 

...A Farewell to Arms and the Picture of Dorian Grey.  (no comma before AND)

Is one right and the other wrong? Technically, no. Folks will argue passionately for one or the other (Oxford Comma forever!), but this is a matter of style. So the newspaper article isn't grammatically incorrect for missing its final comma because it's working with a different style. 

At WTS, we use the Turabian Manual for Writers (8th edition), which DOES use the Oxford Comma (and is SO RIGHT to do so!). This means you should always have a comma before the last element of a list. 

That being said, it's important to follow the style guide in your field. 

Style guides exist for consistency's sake. We want our work to be accessible to others, and it's the information that should shine through, not the sentence formula. When we encounter odd structure, we have to stop and re-read:

Already know you that which you need. 

I love Yoda, but this was confusing to the seven-year-old hearing it for the first time. Is he saying Luke knows himself, or that Luke already knows everything he needs to defeat Vader? There's a good argument that both are happening here, but if we were writing this sentence and we only wanted one meaning to come through (which is what should be happening in academic writing), then we need a style guide. 

Style is what tells us to keep the subject at the front of the sentence and to only use the words we need. In academic writing, we want to heed this advice because it maximizes clarity: 

You already know that which you need. 

Even just putting the subject forward helped clear up the meaning here: Luke can defeat Vader with the information he already has. The style guides help keep our information at the forefront. Follow the style guide--have a better chance of coherency.

On to Strunk and White...

Elements of Style was a grammar cornerstone for decades. It's important going in to remember that these are their suggestions for good writing, and there are those who strongly disagree. For us as readers of Strunk and White, and as academic writers, we must go forward with an eye for CLARITY. Which suggestions make good sense to us in our setting and in our field? Those are the suggestions we want to note. 

“Vigorous writing is concise."

Here's a list of Strunk and White suggestions that I find helpful in academic writing:

1. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” 
   • This is a big part of editing: Remove the thought process from your writing. The final product should show a clear line of thought, from the presentation of your thesis to the conclusion.
2. “To achieve style, begin by affecting none.” 
   • a.k.a. Keep it simple.
3. “When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”
   
   • When editing, read your paper out loud. During the writing process, we tend to add extra words as we work with our ideas. Reading out loud will feel exhausting when we have lots of extra "thinking" words (for instance, THAT is a big one), so we want to weed them out. 
4. “Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; the reader wishes to be told what is... If your every sentence admits a doubt, your writing will lack authority.”
   
   • If I wrote, "The X-Wing fighter was neither round, nor generous with seating. It wasn't very decorative either," you might start to wonder if I had any idea what an X-Wing actually was. Lots of negatives tend to skirt the issue, so if you need them, use only what you need to make a point, but then assert your actual argument. 
5. "'Each and every one.' Pitchman's jargon. Avoid, except in dialogue."
   • Don't use colloquialisms or cliches in academic writing. 

“The situation is perilous, but there is still one chance of escape.” 

This is actually an example quote Strunk and White use to illustrate the proper use of commas, but in my brain, it instantly summarized the most important thing about academic writing: Start writing! 

There's only one way out of a paper--you must start it, and then finish it. So no matter how much the ideas are confusing you or how intimidating the topic might be, just start writing. Editing is for making things pretty, accurate, and perfectly clear. Worry about it after the ideas are out of your head and on the page. You'll understand your ideas better the more you write. 

(Plus, writing is the best!) 

Happy Writing!