When it comes to grammar, I am by no means an expert and I am an even further cry from a so-called “Grammar Nazi.” If you want to end your sentence with a preposition, I won’t care when I’m down below. If you join two independent clauses together with a comma, no skin off my back. If you choose to not use a semi-colon appropriately because either you don’t know how to use it or you realize it’s a rather silly punctuation mark surpassed only in formal uselessness as its half brother the colon; I won’t hunt you down or cringe when I read your writing. If you, the reader, don’t understand the difference between a subordinate and major clause, I won’t be the one to call you an imbecile.

You see, all those problems and a myriad of other rules do little more than allow English majors to be pejorative when you write a paper and mess something up. None of them actually interfere with the clarity or understanding of your message. Following the ridiculous number of rules that E.B . White and William Strunk   Jr . propose in their Elements of Style will let readers of your work know you are “well read” and can adhere to a mostly arbitrary set of rules, which could be a good thing depending on the situation. But when you get right down to it, who actually cares if you ask someone, “What did you step on?” instead of the correct (and incredibly prudish) “On what did you step?” It doesn’t make a lick of difference.

However, not all elements of grammar are as supercilious as the aforementioned elements of what I have a hard time calling “style.”  Other points are actually critical in clearly communicating your point. These important grammar rules include things like spelling, understanding parts of speech, how to properly use suffixes to change the part of speech of a word and things like the Oxford comma.

The Oxford comma lords over all other clarifying grammar rules that actually matter. Usually if someone misspells something or makes up a word, a reader with more than a non-existent brain capacity can use context clues and their knowledge of colloquial speech to figure out what the intended message is. However, if the Oxford comma is omitted from a list of any sort there is no way for you to tell if the last two objects in the list are related or not.

Lynne Truss wrote a book called Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The title of this book is really its only redeeming quality. It comes from a joke in which a panda enters a restaurant, eats a sandwich, then pulls out a gun and murders everyone in the restaurant. Before the panda leaves, a surviving patron asks why the panda did it. The panda throws a field guide to pandas at the man and tells him to look it up. The man turns to the entry for pandas and reads: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” You’re not laughing? I’ll explain. Without the omnipotent Oxford comma, “shoots and leaves” are connected as part of one thing and the only way they can be tied together is if you read “shoots” as a verb instead of as a noun meaning stalks of bamboo.

So why did I bother writing this entire column about using correct grammar? As it turns out, the prescribed style when writing for the paper does not allow for the use of Oxford commas. This means if I ever want to make a list, I won’t be able to because I never know how someone is going to interpret the end! If I ever want to make a point with various pieces of support, I won’t be able to list them without massive confusion. My entire way of writing is going to burn away in a giant ball of fire! So tell me, does the panda shoot after he eats? Did I dip my toast in orange juice when I had cereal, toast and orange juice? I just don’t know and I guess I never will.