Q&A: A Question About Punctuation Marks
A Question About Punctuation Marks
Question
(Even Rav said to Ivu his son: Come, I will teach you worldly matters.)
When there is a list followed by a continuation, I’m not sure how to punctuate it in a comfortable way. For example, in a sentence like:
“Yoni needs two eggs, pudding, rum extract, and flour to make a cake.”
It feels like some punctuation mark is missing between “and flour” and “to,” but adding a comma after “and flour” feels a bit strange. True, you can change the structure of the sentence (To make a cake, Yoni needs two eggs, pudding, rum extract, and flour) or add words, but that isn’t always convenient. What do you think?
Answer
Logic says to put in a comma, and that’s how I used to write it. It turned out that the rules are stricter and say otherwise. When a list ends and you move on to what is done with the list, there is no comma. Strange, but that’s the accepted practice. Since this does not create ambiguity, I wouldn’t go against the rules. When it comes to clarifying the meaning, then there is room to depart from them.
Discussion on Answer
A dash seems a bit too heavy to me, like when the list is short you wouldn’t use a dash (Yossi needs two eggs and pudding to make a cake). But to each his own taste.
By the way, the fact that in a list longer than two items there’s also no comma before the last item also seems strange to me. Why not write, “Here is my list, and it includes item A, item B, item C, and item D”? Especially when each of the items in the list is long, adding a comma improves readability. The conjunction “and” does not contradict a comma.
Seemingly, in this case wouldn’t a dash fit?