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Commas and hyphens

Commas and hyphens: little guys do the heavy lifting The great Clive James has written that “punctuation is not an apparatus of elitist oppression, but a system of information, at the disposal of all.” Couldn’t agree more. Those little dots and squiggles are like motorway signage: they guide you to where you want to go. Or in this case, they guide you to expressing yourself accurately. It’s amazing how much of a difference even the humblest punctuation marks can make. Take the comma, probably the humblest of the lot. Basically, a comma is the written equivalent of a breath pause in speech. There are no hard-and-fast rules for the deployment of commas. A lot depends on personal preference. It is true that some people get in a terrible tizzy over the so-called Oxford comma. This is where you have a list of things, each individual item separated from the next by a comma and the last item preceded by the word “and”. Do you or don’t you put a comma before that “and”? If you