Give me strength, the NHS is on its knees and Therese Coffey issues this.....

[DevaleraSpawnOfSatan]

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/15/therese-coffey-tells-nhs-staff-stop-using-oxford-comma/

😡😡

Down to the usual standard then. "Right everybody, let's tinsel up those deckchairs. What iceberg?"

Wow. Maybe she's still sore about Oxford having kicked her out because of her poor academic performance (either that, or the woman is a genuine moron but since she has a phd in chemistry....she can't be a total idiot). Woman, get over yourself and focus on what actually matters here.

I'd ignore the instruction.

I use an Oxford comma when it would be clearer or more elegant to use the Oxford comma, otherwise I don't.

I suspect that anyone else who cares enough about the Oxford comma to have learnt that that's one of its names has their own preferences too, and would know that even if somehow letter-writing style were the most important issue for the NHS to tackle right now, effective writing isn't about blanket rules on the Oxford fucking comma.

Maybe this is one of those broken-window things

I can’t read the article. Does she think people are using it incorrectly, or does she just not like it?

Our new health secretary, an incompetent and an idiot. [Suggests one person]

Our new health secretary, an incompetent, and an idiot. [Suggests three people]

www.grammarly.com/blog/what-is-the-oxford-comma-and-why-do-people-care-so-much-about-it/

I guess this will be another one of those rules that everyone ignores....

also, having grown up in Cambridge, soneone can be really stupid at the same time as clever

The Oxford comma sometimes works well. I'm into grammar, and I make the deliberate choice to use the Oxford comma sometimes, but not always.

Ffs, hasn't she got more important things to do, like fix the broken NHS?

I'd like to thank my parents, JK Rowling and Martin Amis.
or
I'd like to thank my parents, JK Rowling, and Martin Amis.

Sometimes you really do need the cheeky little squiggle.

Coffey, like all other Govt ministers, doesn't use the NHS, why should she care about it?

There is so much wrong with healthcare, from the disastrous effects of brexit, to low morale and social care but her first e-mail is to stay positive, watch your grammar and don't use jargon (or use big words she wont understand)

I'd suggest getting the doctors to write legibly is more important than where a comma is in my experience!

She would be better using her energies to improve staff recruitment and retention. The fact that the £1400 pay rise pushed some people up into the next pension bracket with increased contributions and ended up meaning that they actually owed more money than their back pay would be a start.

I think she'd be better focusing on our over use of apostrophes. (GP's, I'm looking at you...😬)

I work in the NHS and have never used the Oxford comma. I would never use a comma before 'and'.
I presume this is for official documents rather than writing patient notes and so on. I'm sure it doesn't affect most of us.
I've seen some shockers in the notes though that always make me laugh such as pussy instead of purulent. His penis was pussy was one of them, we all fell about laughing.

I don't know your role, but not even in phrases like "In meeting today, Nurse Specialist X, Dr Y, Mum and Dad, and patient"? Or would you make the effort to rephrase just to avoid an Oxford comma?

I think, based on reading between the lines of the article, the memo/instruction has just gone out to civil servants and other health department staff. So it's not going to clinical/front line NHS people or to hospitals, surgeries, GPs etc.

lol @ pussy penis

Does she really have a PhD in 'chemistry'? That seems... unlikely

It’s standard for a new minister to set out preferences for the papers they will be receiving. The email is also likely to have detailed the font size and spacing they like for speeches, the timings for box submissions and the type of visits and events she’s most likely to agree to. It’s not a diktat for NHS staff, it’s for policy officials, and it will have been a cut and paste job from her preferences at her previous department.

I’m no great fan of the woman, and yes, it seems petty, but she will have a hell of a lot of papers to read each day so they might as well be drafted in her preferred style.

Meh. This isn’t going out to all NHS staff to mandate how GPs and nurses write letters. The Oxford comma point will be for staff writing comms.

I work in the NHS and just had to look up what the Oxford comma actually is!

In that case I'd be tempted to prepare her briefing papers with aggressively frequent Oxford-commaless sentences, specially crafted to be ambiguous without one.

‘‘Twas ever thus. E.g. when a band five progresses after two years. Tiny pay rise but whopping great increase in pension!

She does, but while we're on a thread about punctuation pendantry - why did you put Chemistry in inverted commas as if you don't think it's a real thing?! 😂

So do I. However at work, US English is the standard so if I omit the comma before the and, the tech writer will usually put it in, rewording if necessary for clarity.

Making a rule of it either way is silly, what matters is clarity.