Very often, this blog departs from routine and features posts that, though not strictly legalistic, are intended to be of use to interested members of the legal profession, students and advocates.
One of the most commonly committed errors in legal scholarship, especially, in India, is the violation of the serial comma rule. Briefly stated, the rule says that when three or more objects appear in a sequence, the ‘and’ preceding the last object should be preceded by a comma.
Thus, I like apples, oranges, and lemons. (I don’t like apples, oranges and lemons.)
We have long been ardent proponents of the serial comma rule. Our fervour was rekindled by David Post’s elegant illustration of the difference that a serial comma can make to the meaning of a sentence:
The classic illustration is this:
(a) “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”
versus
(b) “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep”In the first edition of Frost’s Collected Poems, that line (from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) was printed as in (a), but it was corrected in subsequent editions. The point is that the two lines have different meanings — in the first, the woods are lovely; “dark and deep” then becomes a descriptor or illustration of that loveliness. In the second, the woods have three separate characteristics: they’re lovely, they’re dark, and they’re deep.
And in the same vein, because there are more interested members of the legal profession who follow this blog apart from students and advocates (hopefully), the addition of the serial comma would have made all the difference to the first line of this post. Here’s wishing for better writing, all.
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[...] For example, David Post, blogging at Volokh (picked up by Legal Blog Watch | ProfessorBainbridge | Something About The Law ), bemoaned its increasing absence, and argued [with added links]: … use of the serial comma [...]