Four Easy Ways to Write Concisely

Concision can play a huge role in the impact of your message. No one wants to wade through unnecessary words, and worse, wordiness can weaken your writing.

Here are some easy ways to tighten your writing as you self-edit. You are self-editing before you call your copy editor, right? Of course you are.

Elminate the make:  make a promise, make a deal, make a bet, make dinner (okay, you could make dinner.) But you get the idea: doesn’t it sound better to promise, negotiate, wager? Also, to cook dinner sounds more precise, doesn’t it? Or better yet, to boil pasta, simmer tomato sauce…

No basis for basis: on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis, on a temporary basis. Try monthly, weekly, temporarily. Even “each month” is better, though that’s still one word too many.

Step off the preposition train: Track down prepositions like of and to. They can often be eliminated. Especially tedious are preposition trains, where one preposition stacks upon another upon another.

How many books of Stephen King’s do you have in the library that is in Springdale?

How many Stephen King books do you have at Springdale Library?

Eliminate redundancies. Your editor will love you for this one.

Free gift

Each and every one

Share in common

Because the reason is (the reason is because)

Ask a question

Advance planning, advance reservations

Prior plans

The month of July

Repeat over and over

Positive (or beneficial or desirable) benefits

Sudden explosion, sudden impact, sudden anything, really. “Sudden” is a cheesy way to grab attention.

Close proximity

Your high school English teacher isn’t being paid to read your writing, and you don’t get extra credit for extra words. So make it easy for your reader, and they may just love you back.

JoAnne Dyer is an editor, writer, proofreader, and event planner. She founded Seven Madronas Communications in 2015. Seven Madronas specializes in helping change-makers and people doing good in the world. She’s edited dozens of nonfiction books and writes regularly for Nest Publications and The Connector magazine. When she’s not agonizing over subject/verb agreements, she’s hiking in the red canyons of Utah or cooking vegetarian dinners in her native Seattle, Washington.

JoAnne Dyer
Seven Madronas Communications
www.7madronas.com
206-465-9146
Twitter @7madronas
Facebook JoAnneDyerSeattle

STOP WRITING IN GERMAN

(AND OTHER TIPS FOR AUTHORS)

1-- Yes. German. Only German capitalizes common nouns. English does not.  Capitalize the noun only when it is part of an official title, as in “CBS News interviewed President Barack Obama.” But “Hillary Clinton is running for president.” As the letters editor at a major metropolitan daily newspaper, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people write sentences such as this: “I think our City Council is wasting the Taxpayer’s money on building a new Bus Lane.” As they say in German, “Nein!” Lower-case those nouns. And check that apostrophe while you’re at it. I’m sure the money isn’t coming from just one taxpayer. Correct sentence? “I think our city council is wasting the taxpayers’ money on building a new bus lane.”

2-- De-clutter. Think about eliminating those unnecessary explanatory phrases that mire your poor protagonist in syntactical quicksand: “I saw that there was a beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” Better: “There was a beautiful bouquet of roses in a vase on the table.” There’s really no need to say that your protagonist saw something as a preamble to describing what he or she saw. The reader will know intuitively that the “I” in your novel is the one who saw the roses. You can do this for third-person protagonists, too. Opt for: “He’d never heard such nonsense in his life,” instead of “He felt that he had never heard such nonsense in his life.” Say “The thunderstorm scared him,” rather than “He felt scared by the thunderstorm.”

3-- The least said, the better. The fewer words you use, the more evocative the scene will be in your reader’s imagination. Don’t bog your prose down in “whiches” and “thats.” That kind of language is for lawyers, not authors: “The dog that my neighbor used to have, which was a cocker spaniel that died years ago, liked to lie on the porch.” Yikes! Talk about a convoluted chasing of the authorial tail! Try this instead: “My neighbor’s cocker spaniel, dead these many years, liked to lie on the porch.”

4-- Choose active over passive. Make the subject of your sentence take the action, rather than focusing on the object that received it. Example: “The boy was hit in the eye by the hockey puck.” For something shorter, sweeter and to the point, give the action to the puck: “The hockey puck hit the boy in the eye.”

5-- Trust your reader to fill in the blanks. I once read a manuscript that described a woman’s trip to a grocery store in San Antonio. She left her house, pressed her key fob to unlock her car door, opened the door, got into the driver’s seat, closed the car door, turned the key in the ignition, backed out of the driveway, drove to the store (and on the way, the author named every street she drove on), pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, got out of the car, locked the door and went into the store. Whew. But the author wasn’t done quite yet. Once inside the store, the woman went to the produce department and the author proceeded to describe every fruit and vegetable on display, as well as all the customers shopping in that aisle. He could have written instead: “Cathy went to the store and bought a bag of oranges,” and the reader would have instinctively known that Cathy did all the minutiae involving her car, without needing the details written out. The other customers should have been described only if they were going to play some role in the plot; otherwise, the reader will understand, without all the gory details, that other people were shopping at the same time as Cathy.

6-- Chuck the chuckles. Use “said.” It’s simple and unobtrusive. “I remember when you slipped on the banana peel,” he chuckled. Actually, he couldn’t have. Listen to real people talk. If they’re chuckling, they stop to say something. They can’t chuckle and talk at the same time without snorting and choking.

7-- What’s in a name? Give your characters names appropriate for the time period they’re living in, or you’ll shoot down your story’s credibility. I read a novel once whose heroine lived during the Civil War. The author had named her Jennifer. Sorry, but Jennifer is a 20^th century name which came into popular usage after George Bernard Shaw used it in his 1906 play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Before that, it was known only in Cornwall. Is your protagonist a 14^th century mystic sighing away her days in a crumbling and drafty convent? Great, but don’t call her Kailey or Alyssa.

8-- Listen to that gut feeling. If something isn’t working in your novel, whether it’s a paragraph, a single sentence or a whole subplot, let it go and try a different approach. When you try to force something that doesn’t work, it reads to editors, literary agents and publishers like you forced it. You can’t fool them.

9-- If you’re writing an article for a magazine or newspaper, all the above rules apply, except of course, the one about names. Show respect for the submission guidelines, especially on word counts. At the newspaper where I work, we have a policy that letters must be no more than 150 words long. Yet, people keep sending in 500-word missives and are miffed when they’re not published. When I was a reporter, I quickly learned to write my stories to length because I found that if I didn’t, the first thing the copy editors would cut was always the paragraph I loved best. Spare yourself that grief and stick to the assigned word count.

10-- To learn from the technique and style of a genius, read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne or The Luck of Ginger Coffey, two novels by Brian Moore. He can deliver a devastating one-two punch to your emotions with just three words. Not one word is wasted. That’s what you’re aiming for.

Naomi Lakritz has been writing and editing at daily newspapers for 37 years. She is a columnist, editorial writer and the letters editor at the Calgary Herald. She owns Naomi Lakritz Editing Services, based in Calgary, Canada, and edits manuscripts, website content, academic papers and a variety of other documents. She also translates from French and Italian into English. Her website is www.quantumorange.net and she can be reached at njlakritz@shaw.ca

Make Your Voice Original by Getting Rid of "Received Text"

What Is Received Text?

When I first heard the term “received text,” its meaning wasn’t immediately clear. I thought back to my Catholic elementary school lessons, and veritable old Moses grabbing a pair of stone tablets out of the sky. Received text—good? Important? Kinda heavy?

In fact, “received text” isn’t a good thing. It is a form of cliché, received from the nebulous lingo of lazy writing, stereotypes, aphorisms, business jargon, and slang re-digested back into soundbites and advertising copy. It’s our lingua franca, for better or worse: useful enough when it supplies you with easy rejoinders while stuck in an awkward conversation, but unhelpful when you are striving for nuance and originality in your fiction.

Most of us can identify a cliché: fast as lightning. A penny saved is a penny earned. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. (Actually, that one amuses me.) But the English language is full of humdrum, often nonsensical phrases that suck the life out of prose: a home-cooked meal, humble abode, gone downhill in recent years, soon learned, at present, stunning beachfront, fast friends, terrible mistake, flirted shamelessly, rotating cast, newly minted, perfect opportunity, let loose… etc. Any of these can be funny if you use them in full awareness of their unoriginality, and delight your reader with them in an unexpected, even absurd context: in short, if you reclaim the element of surprise.

Because that’s what good writing is. Surprising. Interesting. Creative. If you show up at a restaurant expecting artful food from the kitchen, but get a bowl of pablum, why stay to finish the meal? Clichés are mush. If, however, the food looks okay, and has some flavor but reminds you of every meal you’ve ever eaten at Olive Garden, then you’ll probably finish it but never be back. Received text ultimately has the same effect on a reader; and frankly, though I'm loath to waste money on a mediocre meal, I would prefer the loss to having wasted ten or fifteen hours of the weekend on a mediocre novel.

Fiction is the place to be bold and brave. To tell your truth, no matter how weird it sounds. Recognizing lifeless imagery is half of the task, but the other half—fixing it—is addressed outside of the page, too. To live a writer’s life doesn’t mean wearing peacoats, drinking yourself past the fear of a blank page, or needing to move to a villa in Italy before you can pen a magnum opus.

It does, however, mean keeping a notebook. It means noticing what you think and feel. It means taking your eyes off the damn ball once in a while, and noticing the details that are always around you every single second of the day. It begins with growing once again familiar with your vast capacity for originality, and taking the risk of writing it down. We're all born with these abilities. We grow up and learn to be dull. And then, when we make a commitment to improving our writing craft, we get to relearn our creativity, and cheerfully experiment with it in the lines of a manuscript.

Examples

It is impossible for this single blog post to expunge received text from your writing once and for all. The best I can do is illuminate the first few lamps along the road. So: I've had fun draining the life out of six of my recent, favorite lines in fiction. I used word choices and phrases that I often see as an editor (the underlined parts). The information is the same, but the writing is bland, vague, and off-the-cuff. After each one, you'll see the much-better original.

1. She had an unmemorable face and bleach-blonde hair, and I was thinking to myself that if I were in her boyfriend's shoes I wouldn't want to touch her with a ten-foot pole.

"She is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor." (From In the Woods, by Tana French)

2.Rosie's mom was always a bundle of nerves. She was rich and had the luxury of holding a grudge and unchallenged stereotypes. Her fridge held nothing but condiments and old bread. Charlie didn't know what she ate, and once suggested to Rosie that maybe she was a vampire, but she didn't think it was funny.

"Rosie's mother was a high strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries, and feuds. She lived in a magnificent flat in Wimple Street with nothing in the enormous fridge but bottles of vitaminized water and rye crackers. . . . Fat Charlie thought it highly likely that Rosie's mum went out at night in bat form to suck the blood from sleeping innocents. He had mentioned this theory to Rosie once, but she had failed to see the humor in it." (From Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman)

3. Dench was a shifty-eyed hippy. 

"This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom . . ." (From "Wings," by Lorrie Moore)

4. That was so typical. WASPy people will make a fuss about a lost kitten, but we Dominicans, we believe in tough love.

"That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon." (From The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Junot Díaz)

5. He looked surprised, and she could see realization dawning in his eyes. He was naive and coddled, and she wished he would toughen up.

"He looked at her in surprise and his eyes changed slowly, like land growing lighter after a cloud passes. He was naive, and it infuriated her the way he still possessed the luxury of disappointment." (From Be Safe I Love You, by Cara Hoffman)

6. She laughed in the face of sadness.

"She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well." (From The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat)

Sarah Cypher, Editor at The Threepenny Editor

sarah@threepennyeditor.com

Feel free to share a few of your own stinkers with me on Twitter (@threepenny).

Read more about Project 2015--making this year your breakthrough year—here.

Know How . . . and Who and What

As an aspiring author you’ve probably been doing your homework – studying your favorite writers, reading up on how to publish and market your book, looking for cover designs. You might also be checking out grammar tips; you don’t want to be the person who writes, “You don’t want to be the person that…” Yes, an editor will fix those things, but it’s good practice to know the tools of your craft.

And as well as knowing your craft, you need to know your audience.

With a global marketplace and different versions of English spoken in various parts of the world, you need to think about who you want to buy your book. If you’re writing the great American novel, you’re probably okay using standard American English because everyone’s heard it on Mad Men and Friends. But maybe you’d like to create a British version of your book, or you have a British character and you want to make sure he sounds authentic. Is Nigel Lemming-Smyth more likely to say, “I haven’t gotten around to it” or “I’ve not got ‘round to it”? You know you need to change the spelling of words like “honour” and “centre,” but will you remember to catch words like “programme,” “jewellery,” and “furore”?

Watch those quotes and commas, too, because Britain and America have different rules about punctuation.

Similarly, if you’re self-publishing in England and you want to reach as wide an audience as possible, you probably want to appeal to the US market. So it might be a good idea to limit your idiomatic expressions, words or phrases that aren’t used in other countries. Words like “moggy” and “gee-gees” make sense to you, but Tammy in Miami may put your book down because she has no idea what you’re talking about!

A writer of children’s books needs to know what age group she’s aiming for, and write for that reading level. A story for a five-year-old can have a similar plot to a book for a nine-year-old: a child feels sad because he thinks no one remembered his birthday, but then his friends do something really special for him. Some things, like ice cream and cake, are ageless. But will a younger child understand the word “generosity”? And will a nine-year-old want to continue reading a book mostly made up of three-letter words?

Again, you’ll want to consider where you plan to publish because school curriculum and cultural attitudes may affect reading comprehension of the children you hope will read your book.

You not only need to figure out who you’re writing for, you need to know what the current trends are in that market. Know your competition. Read books that are popular with your target audience and figure out why they’re popular. What do you like about those books, how do they engage the reader? Don’t copy, but see what commonalities there are in that genre and think about how you can apply them to your writing.

Now, when you’ve done your writing, and you’ve re-read your manuscript, and fiddled and scribbled and made a few changes and read it again, get an editor. But remember, know your editor.

If you’re stretching yourself by trying something a little beyond your knowledge base – and there’s nothing wrong with that – you need to do your research, and you definitely need an editor who will notice inconsistencies and anomalies, the things that don’t ring true. An editor will go through your manuscript looking for those kinds of things specifically, and will point them out to you. For instance, I recently read through a book excerpt by a writer in Nigeria. There was no problem with the author’s command of English, but there were occurrences of both US and British usage. Given Nigeria’s colonial past and international influences today, Nigerians probably use a mixture of Englishes and may not be aware that some phrases are idiomatic to one country or another. I suggested to the author that he should stick to either British or American English to be sure his writing is clear to his intended audience. As an editor who has worked in both the United States and Great Britain, I look for those discrepancies and fix them as needed.

You may be a teacher of literature, and you’ve got a great story about the Bloomsbury writers. You know your subject and you know the language – you’re an expert, right? I still suggest you hire a copy editor, and maybe one who has some knowledge of twentieth-century English literature. You need an objective and knowledgeable reader to catch irregularities and make sure your work is as good as it can be. You wouldn’t want to sabotage your impressive author’s bio because you inadvertently spelled Desmond MacCarthy’s name wrong.

The editing process really isn’t as painful as you might think. Sure, you’re going to be a bit mortified or indignant when you see the changes your editor makes to your manuscript. Did she really need to remove that comma there and put one in over here? Maybe not – commas are pretty subjective. But your editor has probably read quite a few books and blogs that discuss serial commas and en dashes and parallel construction and misplaced modifiers. Books that tell you when to capitalize a two-letter word in a title (almost never). Blogs that you might consider quite boring. This is the kind of thing editors read for fun, so they usually know what they’re doing when they add or remove punctuation, or rearrange sentences or delete adverbs.

Besides catching obvious typos and mistakes, editors will look for consistency in your writing, like if you write “e-mail” in one place and “email” in another. They’ll notice if Louise’s sister’s name changes from Brianna to Brittany. They’ll tell you if you’ve used the word “tellingly” way too often. But an editor who has a particular background or specialty can be even more helpful when you’re writing for a certain, targeted audience. This is true if you’re writing in any specialized subject, from physics to architecture to horse-riding; you want an editor who knows his quarks, quoins or quirts.

You’ve done your homework and your research; you’ve put a lot of time and effort into your writing. You know your craft and you know your audience. If you find an editor who has done the same, your manuscript will be in safe hands.

Valerie Spanswick is a freelance copy/line editor, proofreader and occasional writer who edits both fiction and non-fiction. She has lived, worked and studied in the US and the UK, and is currently based in Eugene, Oregon. Her background includes art and architectural history and aesthetics, and work in publishing, technical editing and video production. She’s online at vswordcraft.blogspot.com.

Maintaining the proper point of view

Aside from grammatical errors, the most common sin I find in the work of rookie novelists is "head-hopping"—that is, giving the viewpoint, or point of view (POV), to more than one character in a scene. This is a big no-no.

Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. Writers have three basic choices: the first person singular (“I”), the second person (“you”), and the third person (“he”/”she”). In the first-person point of view, the story is told by an “I” who is a character in the story—often the lead character, but not always. In third-person the author has two narrative perspectives to choose from—the third-person pure omniscient point of view, which is told by an “outside” voice that has access to any character’s actions and thoughts, and the third-person limited omniscient point of view, which is similar but is limited to the thoughts and perspective of a single character per scene.

First-person novels are popular, but second-person narratives are useless to new writers because they’re mostly considered to be experimental works and are nearly impossible to get published. Most fiction houses today are happiest with the third-person format, believing it to be the most commercial approach. We may also note that many novels on the best-seller lists are written this way, perhaps because stories of action/adventure and thrillers lend themselves so well to the less constricting third-person viewpoint.

That doesn’t mean you should avoid using the first person. Many first-person novels are published. Despite the limitations of the first-person POV, I like them, mainly because they are a refreshing change from all the third-person novels out there and because I can get to know the protagonist better and identify with that person.

Long gone is the popularity of the verbose, pure omniscient third-person narrator. Many nineteenth-century novelists used and abused this narrative style, pushing the envelope to include a great deal of narrative by an unseen, godlike intelligence who knows all the details of the past, who can see the future, and who loves to comment on the action and the story people with a variety of asides, lectures, and sermons like an Olympian sportscaster. Such writers would frequently insert copy something like this:

The coach departed in a clatter of hooves and a great swirl of fog, leaving MacGregor standing alone in the dark, gazing apprehensively up the long curve of road leading to the dim mansion, cloistered in oaks, at the top of the hill. It would be a difficult climb, burdened as he was with two heavy portmanteaus, but he was determined to make it. O foolish man! You suspect nothing, anticipate only joy. But ahead, for you, lies more evil than you ever expect to encounter. Pity him, gentle reader, for the unutterable horrors he must soon face, and pray that his moral fiber and his long-held convictions will see him through these tribulations.

I wrote this all by myself. Pretty impressive, eh?

Would you enjoy reading a novel filled with dreck like this? Neither would anyone else. That’s why ninety-nine percent of nineteenth-century novels and their authors have slipped into obscurity—and why today’s novelists should make every effort to avoid such a bloated omniscient prose style.

These days the third-person limited omniscient narrator is much more palatable. In this viewpoint the story is told only in the third person, but it is limited to the perspective of a single character in each scene. That’s the most rigorous view of this form of narration, anyway, and the safest one for new writers. In this POV little or nothing appears in the scene that the viewpoint character doesn’t experience directly, and anything that character didn’t experience is still related from his or her perspective, with the explicit or implicit understanding that this information was related to that character by someone else. If your POV character faints, the scene ends. If your POV character walks out of the room, the reader goes out the door, too, and never stays behind with the characters who do not have the point of view. Most important, you should never allow your POV person to be shoved aside by some divine stage manager who comments on the story and its players.

When writers of fiction lose their grip, narratively speaking, on this limited form of viewpoint, then they slip into the realm of the unrestricted omniscient narrator. Considered in the strictest sense, all background information, character sketches, history lessons, travelogues, and such occupy the province of the all-seeing, all-knowing pure omniscient narrator. The only way to avoid that is to couch such material cleverly, offering it to the reader via the intelligence of the POV character.

If you’re limited to the viewpoint of only one person in each scene, how then can you convey the thoughts of a character who is not given the POV for that scene? Here are a few tips:

Put that character’s thoughts in dialogue.
Put that character’s emotions on his/her face and have the POV character correctly interpret those feelings after looking at him/her.
Wait until that character is given a point of view, then have him/her reflect on the previous scene and relate his/her thoughts.

Please, please, friends, no more head-hopping!

Paul Thayer is a freelance book editor specializing in line editing and
critiques of fiction and nonfiction books. He lives in Florida with his two
cats, Mojo and Fiona.

Paul Thayer
Thayer Literary Services
www.your-book-editor.com

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers...

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ~Neil Gaiman

Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright

Anne Teresa Enright FRSL is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright

Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – L. Grossman

Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels: Warp, Codex, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land.  

- If you don't have time to read, you don't have time, or the tools to write. ~ Stephen King

Some sage writing advice from Hemingway

Why your self published book isn't getting reviews

PUTTING YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD
How do we put this delicately?...

--We have nothing against self published or small press publications.  Unfortunately though, there are a number of the aforementioned who are giving the rest of you a bad name.

When you submit your book for an award or for review, it goes without saying that you need to put your best foot forward.  That means, first and foremost, no typographical errors.  Sadly, we review a great number of books which are simply fabulous . . . with one exception.  - Too many typographical or grammatical errors.

Hey, we’re all human.  Even the best known publishing houses occasionally let a typo or two slip.  - But when you’re talking a significant number of typos, well that’s just not something we can overlook.

We are in the business of helping put readers in touch with excellence in literature.  We’re also in the business of helping you, as an author, gain recognition for your work.  We do this by offering free reviews and through our Literary Classics Seal of Approval and Awards programs.

But in order to offer free reviews, we must use our time efficiently.  Therefore, when we consider a book for review, we will continue reading your book as long as we can, before we discover too many typographical or grammatical errors.  You may ask: ‘how many is too many?’  Well the short answer is - one!  Your book should be in top-notch shape.  Occasionally, if we are ‘wowed’ by a book, we may choose to ignore the first error.  But you don’t want to push your luck.  In fairness to our readers who are trusting us to identify the best books based upon our recommendations, we cannot, in good faith, recommend a book which is riddled with errors.

Another area of weakness which we see all too often is a poorly developed story.  One of the greatest challenges an author faces, is the difficulty of translating his/her thoughts onto paper.  What may be glaringly obvious to you, may not be so clear to the reader.  Unfortunately, if a book is lacking in plot, or motivation, or is simply too hard to follow, your reader will most likely lose interest.

It is our recommendation that before your book is ever submitted to a publisher, you have a professional critique and a professional edit performed of your manuscript (in that order) from a credible source.

Article re-posted with permission from Literary Classics Book Awards and Reviews www.clcawards.org

Regarding the hotly debated subject of ‘good vs. well’ in response to the question, ‘How are you?’

THE OXFORD, OR SERIAL, COMMA

The Oxford comma is an optional comma placed before the word 'and' when placed at the end of a list.

Also called the 'serial comma', the Oxford comma was traditionally used at Oxford University Press.  Not all writers and publishers use the Oxford comma.

Lay vs. Lie

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