Who cares about the details of English punctuation? Well some of the punctuation experts based at the headquarters of  the Oxford University Press are up in arms about the poor standard of punctuation in current English and this is now focusing on something known as ‘The Oxford comma’. We all learned at school that when we’re making a list of things, we separate them with a comma and the last two with ‘and’  so we’d have eggs, bacon and chips but then that would be wrong and apparently it should be eggs, bacon, and chips. We have seen strange uses of apostrophes (anyone wondered why Earl’s Court station has an apostrophe but Barons Court station which is the next stop doesn’t have one?) but unless there is a real breakdown or ambiguity in meaning I think I’d be joined by most of the population of the English speaking world in saying ‘who cares!’ Of course at UIC when you are learning English you will be well grounded in important punctuation, so don’t think we’d completely abandon the rules!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2011 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Learning English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.