Comma, Comma, Comma Chameleon

One thing that kept occurring to me while I was reading the chapter this week, is that the biggest offenders with grammar are usually on social media and in text. I think that people find these forms of communication to be so casual that they don't have to worry about their grammar, but I disagree. The offense that bothers me the most (aside from the misuse of homophones) is when people use commas like confetti or not at all. Knowing the rules even better will help me to not be an offender, too.

One rule that stood out to me this week is about serial commas. AP style is much different than most of what I learned in my English minor program, so it will take me some adjusting. The Oxford (or serial comma) is something that I often use in my writing, but I will definitely have to adjust that for this course.

I would normally write a sentence with a list like this:

I am a student at Weber State University. My areas of study are English, communication, and sociology. 

With the AP style rule about serial commas, you should omit the comma when the last item in a series is connected by a coordinating conjunction. Therefore, I would write that sentence like this:

I am a student at Weber State University. My areas of study are English, Communication and sociology.  

The other rule that I did not know about was that you aren't supposed to use a comma to separate a noun or pronoun from its reflexive. In all honesty, I had never heard of a reflexive. (Shameful, I know!) A reflexive is any of the "self" pronouns (myself, himself) used to intensify or accent the noun or pronoun preceding it. A comma is not needed to set off the reflexive:

The chef herself will cook the entire meal for her party. 

The moral of this is that a comma can be your friend or your enemy, learn and use them well. Remember, the comma is designed to improve the flow of prose, not impede it, but poor construction and comma overuse often combine to create passages with disconnected sounds and parts.