I have seen the future.

Except "I'd like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand and God" is worse, and your clumsy example is clumsy wording *but* still clear that it is a comma-delimited list delimited by commas.

So, going back to the OP, "it is also obviously clear that rewriting the sentence would be better AND that the situation was constructed specifically to create a situtation where comma-delimiting a comma-delimited list might be confusing."

From:

fridgepunk.livejournal.com

Though to be fair if they meant to imply that their mothe was Ayn Rand and God, they would used a semi colon rather than a comma.

Also pluralised "mother".

From:

Be fair: someone who believed that would consider Ayn Rand and God to be the same person (and thus not pluralise mother), and would also not know how to use a semicolon.

From:

houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

Bravo, bravo, and bravo!

From:

lafinjack.livejournal.com

Thoughts on the names serial comma and Oxford comma?

From:

I prefer "serial comma" because it's more descriptive. However, "Oxford Comma" is better known, and thus clearer.

From:

dantheserene.livejournal.com

* note that there is generally no comma between the penultimate item and ‘and’/‘or’, unless required to prevent ambiguity – this is sometimes referred to as the ‘Oxford comma’.
✘ He took French, Spanish, and Maths A-levels.
✓ I ate fish and chips, bread and jam, and ice cream.
✓ We studied George III, William and Mary, and Henry XIII.
✘ She left her money to her parents, Mother Theresa and the pope.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/public_affairs/services_and_resources/style_guide/index.html

From:

That is a document from Oxford's Public Affairs department. The actual university part of Oxford University still goes with the serial comma.

It says more about PR departments than modern grammar.

From:

The Oxford Comma is an abomination, and those who use it deserve to die in a heretic's fire.

From:

Because comma-delimiting your comma-delimited lists is somehow wrong? No. Your opinion is bad, wrong, and incorrect, and you should feel bad.

From:

Burn, heretic!

From:

When you find yourself on the side of the PR department, it is time to pause and reflect.

From:

I have paused, reflected and discarded.

From:

Your pause was while both reflected and discarded? That makes no sense.

From:

Yeah, no.

From:

That's what you said. If you mean you had "paused, reflected, and discarded" you should have said so.

From:

sheilagh.livejournal.com

wow. this whole subthread earned an entry in my Memories list. I've forgiven writers who had other huge flaws when I saw that they took pains to consistently use the ye olde Oxford comma. it just HELPS SO MUCH.

From:

matgb

See, I always find the Oxford Comma confusing as hell, because my English Grammar School education specifically taught me that it was Wrong to a level of Wrongness above even spiltting infinitives. So even though my brain knows it's a good thing and useful, I don't instinctively use it because I was taught not to and told off if I did it in error.

From:

Ergh, sympathies.

(I was talking to someone last year and trying to explain that it mattered where an apostrophe went; they said they'd been taught both it's and its' (or any other word, not just it) to describe possession was acceptable, so they should always choose the latter so as not to confuse their readers as to whether or not it was a conjunction. I cringed and wished I could say something sharp to whatever nitwit told them that.)

From:

Your grammar school education was Creationism-Level-Wrong.

From:

ladysisyphus.livejournal.com

While I'm in 100% agreement with you re: the necessity and correctness of serial commas, given some of the sentences my students churn out of for me, there are days when I'm just happy they used any punctuation at all.

From:

I am always surprised when markers aren't allowed to just fail papers, outright, for incoherency.

I'm inclined to be more lenient for handwritten material done on a short deadline, like an in-class test, but that's not what people are marking, most of the time.

From:

ladysisyphus.livejournal.com

I wish I could fail papers for incoherency! But the sad truth is, I'm pretty sure the department and/or administration wouldn't back me up on it. I know you've seen some of the gibberish I've gotten, and a lot of that comes from juniors and seniors who, if I failed them, would come back to me with 'but every other paper I've written like this has gotten a passing grade!' And they wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one -- they'd be totally sincere. I had students this semester who turned in things to me that were just rampantly (but not maliciously) plagiarized, who were shocked by the grades I gave them, because, as they said, they usually get As on things.

...Plus (and this is sad to admit but true) that kind of effort is WAY above what they're paying me to do. Give me a full-time position with benefits, and I will come down on folk like the Editorial Hammer of God. But what they're paying me this semester literally doesn't even cover my rent, and I'm already giving them way more return on that investment than they deserve.

From:

You know how we're short on STEM students? That shortage would be much worse if the people grinding through their science courses or advanced math classes get failed out because they're poor writers.

There are not enough people who can do math and science and write in the world. Hell, doing any one of the three well puts you ahead of the curve. Failing the people who do good technical work because they can't write well will not make the world a better place.

From:

"Can't form a coherent sentence, in an assignment for a writing course, given time to edit and access to the internet" is, in fact, a damning fact.

(And no, even if we weren't talking about a writing course, even nerds need to be able to communicate coherently. Someone who cannot document or communicate about their "good technical work" is NOT DOING GOOD TECHNICAL WORK.)

From:

"Access the internet" doesn't help much if one is just not a good writer, unless the plan is simple plagiarism. Time to edit is fine, but there are people who need several edits to bring their writing up to the level of 'marginally coherent.' Writing is a skill. Like any skill, there are people who aren't good at it.

I know good techies and one engineer who can speak just fine, can get technical points across in an email, but can't write to save their lives. Many management structures plan for this, and keep project directors and technical writers around to pick up the slack.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not waving off the importance of clear writing, and I think even poor writers need to write, and improve their skills as much as they can. A lack of writing ability is a liability in almost every field, and those techies who can't write well would be more effective and better techies if they could. I'm not one of those who thinks that "improving STEM education" means "crush liberal arts." That said, you make poor writing ability an absolute roadblock to continuing education, you are only creating more uneducated people.

From:

"Access the internet" doesn't help much if one is just not a good writer, unless the plan is simple plagiarism.

It means you have access to free, complete, and reasonably accurate dictionaries and spellcheckers and grammar parsers

And, okay, sure: Let's accept that "there are people who need several edits to bring their writing up to the level of 'marginally coherent'", that's fine. Before submitting their writing, they need to *do those edits*. At the very least, there's no excuse for not spellchecking a submitted course document.

From:

Reference materials are helpful, but they don't create skill. Lo these many years ago, almost fifteen years, I worked in the University of Richmond's writing center. It pretty selective then (much moreso now), and I still ran into students, intelligent students, who needed several passes of edits just to get the level of "parses as terrible writing instead of wordsalad." Some of them were just lazy, some of them put in a lot of work to get to the level where only a quarter of their writing was showing up red in the spellcheck. There wasn't enough time to get clean up all their grammar errors and spelling problems; it was a matter of triage.

Here's another thing: a lot of the lazy bastards put up a convincing show of being dilligent-but-untalented students, while a lot of the dilligent-but-untalented act more like their lazy because they prefer to be regarded as lazy than stupid.

Plenty of students are just lazy bastards. Some of them, however, are seriously deficient in writing skill. Holding the rest of their education hostage will not eliminate that shortcoming. I'm okay with waving them through instead of sacrificing their educations and future careers on the alter of writing.

From:

Except we're not talking about sacrificing their educations and futures on the altar of writing. We're talking about them faililng *a writing class* where *explaining and arguing the material* using *your ability to write* is *how you pass the class*.

And your suggestion would be to give them a pass on that, marking them as someone who CAN write?

If you can't handle integration, you will fail calculus.
Calculus should not pass you. If your desired level of education requires calculus, then you *need* to either learn it well enough to pass, or choose a different goal. Marking you as "having the level of calculus mastery required for this degree" when you don't have it is a *bad thing*.

From:

And your suggestion would be to give them a pass on that, marking them as someone who CAN write?

Yes. The alternative is removing writing from the curriculum, or turning it into an a roadblock for education. Fudging marks on a ledger is trivial by comparison-- actually, it's trivial, period. Fetishization of grades is part of the problem with modern educational standards.

Calculus should not pass you. If your desired level of education requires calculus, then you *need* to either learn it well enough to pass, or choose a different goal. Marking you as "having the level of calculus mastery required for this degree" when you don't have it is a *bad thing*.

If it's a university education, where the core requirements are geared toward broadening the mind of the student and exposing them to a broader way of thinking, then the talented writer who can't do calculus and the talented engineer who can't write should get the pass. General education is a good thing, but it can't coexist with the expectation that everyone gets 80 percent on everything.

The english student who can't write and the engineering student who can't calculate forces should be failed out. Waving by the student who is broadening his experience in fields he's not good is not a bad thing.

From:

Fetishization of grades is part of the problem with modern educational standards.

Possibly, but I suspect it's not nearly as much of a problem as refusing to fail people who haven't actually passed a course.

Waving by the student who is broadening his experience in fields he's not good is not a bad thing.

If the student wants to broaden their experience, then they can audit the course, and not worry about a grade. If the student wants to be graded, they can damn well be graded fairly.

From:

Except in university curriculums they very often can't. There are a number of core requirements all students have to take, which often include things like foreign languages, literature, history-- things that absolutely should be part of a university education, but shouldn't be roadblocks if you can't hit 80% on their tests. If you want to argue that they should have the option of taking more of them pass/fail, I would agree. Or that one should be able to take not-critical-to-their-degree courses and exclude them from the all-important GPA.

If such options were more available, then I'd have more sympathy for a closer accounting of the gradebooks. As it is, the fetishization of grades makes no priority-- the grade inflation that might make sense to let the university student pass his out-of-discipline core courses often gets applied to his in-discipline, really-you-need-to-know-this work.

From:

Triple-checking, here; since I presume you're not suggesting that on top of the workload they already have[1] it is the job of the marker to follow up on each student's individual curriculum to find out what they're currently enrolled in and assess the likelihood that they will ever switch into a specialty where the course they are currently being marked on is relevant, how do you think it should be assessed whether or not a course is core?

Or really, why not make courses which aren't relevant unnecessary? You say these things absolutely should be part of a university education--why? So someone can say "No, I can absolutely sit in a large room and pick up enough to end up on the pass side of pass/fail, guess how much I paid for that?" If you just want to expose people to this, then you can; if you want what they take away from the exposure to matter, then assess it.

Also the idea that these things are a roadblock if you can't get an A in them seems odd. Even assuming you need a B average to graduate, and even assuming the non-core courses compromise half of the curriculum, that would mean that the problem with an engineer who got Cs in all their engineering courses and Bs in the others was that the unrelated courses were the roadblock... and not the fact that they couldn't do the damn engineering work.
---
[1] See also the pay which at the very least suggests heavy pressure to find another source of income, which often means another job.

From:

it is the job of the marker to follow up on each student's individual curriculum to find out what they're currently enrolled in and assess the likelihood that they will ever switch into a specialty where the course they are currently being marked on is relevant, how do you think it should be assessed whether or not a course is core?

A university has survey courses, 101-style stuff, for non-majors in the field. The instructor doesn't have to run down the status of each student, since the majors in the field are usually taking a more advanced class.

Or really, why not make courses which aren't relevant unnecessary? You say these things absolutely should be part of a university education--why?

Because the definition of a university is an institution that provides a broad education. There are technical institutes that offer more focused degrees-- MIT, for instance, is a top-ranking educational institution that doesn't happen to be a university. I'd rather not turn universities into technical institutions, though. I think it's good for humans to have their perspectives widened. This goal doesn't mesh well, however, with educational institutions that insist on tracking GPA uber alles and expecting people to get a minimum 80% on everything.

There are many people who want a broad education, then continue in a specialized field. The system shouldn't punish curiosity. The student who wants some exposure to literature and history, then go on to get an advanced degree in engineering-- Sorry kid! You didn't get a high grade in that history course, which torpedoed your GPA and made it hard for you to get a PhD program, much less a stipend. The religious inviolability of a gradebook on a survey course is more important than your future.

Edit: quotefix

Edited Date: 2013-04-23 05:08 pm (UTC)

From: