Gramer Girl here, I'm a neon focirty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today,

we'll talk about the most controversial of all punctuation marks, the Oxford comma,

and then we'll talk about starting a sentence with the word and. And finally, I have the

winning poem from the Aces National Grammar Day poetry contest. The Oxford comma is the

comma that goes before the final and in a series. For example, if I write snorts, comma,

howls, comma, and gaffaws, if I put a comma after howls and before the word and, that's

an Oxford comma. It's also called the serial comma or rarely the series comma or the Harvard

comma. But the name Oxford comma seems to be the most popular and it gets that name because

it's the style used by the influential Oxford University press. The name Oxford comma is

newer than you might think though. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first printed

use of the term in 1978, although it's likely it had already been used among editors for

at least a few years before then, because the example is from an informal history of the

Oxford University press and is talking about the origin of the comma rule. In fact, I found

what I believe is an example from 1974 in the Google Books database, although I wasn't

able to see the whole thing. By contrast, I found references to the phrase serial comma from

as far back as 1935 and series comma from as far back as 1919. The first style book should

be recommended using the Oxford comma came out in 1905 in England and Strunk's first edition

of the elements of style, which came out a few years later in America in 1918, also recommended

the serial comma. The 1905 book credited with establishing the Oxford comma rule is titled

Author and Printer, a guide for authors, editors, printers, characters of the press,

compositors and typists by Francis Howard Collins. And it appears that Collins and his

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