Help!!! My Lists Are Being Smothered in Commas!!!

Good afternoon! I took the day off yesterday because I was not feeling very well. But I am back today and feeling much, much better!

Today we are going to cover a very simple rule for commas. So let’s begin!

Our rule today sort of continues our previous discussion of serial commas. What do you do if the list in your sentence ALSO has commas? 

For example:

• The Senior Technical Engineer wrote three technical manuals as follows: Becoming an IT Tech, which describes the learning process; The Importance of Continued Education in IT, which offers examples of how an IT tech can maintain his edge through education; and Review Time, which sums up how an IT tech can make the best impression when it’s time for his annual review!

In this sentence, you need a comma between the names of the technical manuals and their descriptions. If you only used commas here, this is what your sentence would look like:

• The Senior Technical Engineer wrote three technical manuals as follows: Becoming an IT Tech, which describes the learning process, The Importance of Continued Education in IT, which offers examples of how an IT tech can maintain his edge through education, and Review Time, which sums up how an IT tech can make the best impression when it’s time for his annual review!

Here is another example, which you will find in The Chicago Manual of Style (a copy editor’s best friend):

• The defendant, in an attempt to mitigate his sentence, pleaded that he had recently, on doctor’s orders, gone off his medications; that his car—which, incidentally, he had won in the late 1970s on Let’s Make a Deal—had spontaneously caught on fire; and that he had not eaten for several days.

You can see where this would tend to get a little confusing when you have large or complex lists that contain internal punctuation. So the rule states that if items in a series also contain commas (or any punctuation really) internally, separating the items with semicolons can make your text clearer.

Pretty simple, right? In many situations, this rule is optional, meaning you could use either commas or semicolons to separate the items in your list. However, as writers and copy editors, one of our main goals is to provide a text (in ANY genre) in which the reader doesn’t have to work at understanding what point you are trying to make. You want your text to flow simply, elegantly, and—most importantly—CLEARLY! 

So that’s all I will torture you for today! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. 

Until tomorrow—cross your Ts, dot your Is, and mind your Ps and Qs! They say a lot about you!

Your copy editor,

Laura