Pet Peeve
Several grammatical missteps really irritate me each time I encounter them in an essay or an online post. I am by no means perfect, but I feel like all we need to do is be keen when writing to avoid the small annoying grammatical errors. For instance, I'm always mad at people who wrongly use 'Your’ and 'You're' in sentences. This extremely pisses me off. At times I feel like calling these people out for making such confusion. 'Your' implies possession. An example is; your use of language is pathetic. Elsewhere, ‘You’re’ is a contraction of you are. An example is; you’re looking good today. These are two words with totally different meanings. Confusing the two changes the meaning of the whole sentence. In fact, it makes the sentence lose meaning.
The Use of the Oxford Comma
The Oxford Comma is necessary for differentiating the last two items in a series. It helps avoid any form of ambiguity that might exist when mentioning the last two items in a series. One can clearly tell the exact items being referred to in the sentence. For instance, let us consider the statement; ‘I went to the store and bought apples, bananas, and oranges.’ It means that I bought each fruit independently of the other. It is clear that I bought three distinct fruits. It also implies that the fruits are not related to each other. However, when the last comma is omitted, it brings in the element of ambiguity. 'I went to the store and bought apples, bananas and oranges,' implies that 'apples' is an adjective describing bananas and oranges. It is the same as saying, 'I went to the store and bought apples-bananas and apples-oranges,' which is clearly unintended. That is exactly why I feel it is necessary to use the Oxford comma for clarity.
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