Great to see at the weekend that Owen Paterson, rural affairs secretary, takes proper punctuation so seriously that he interrupted his preparations for the imminent badger cull to issue an edict on the subject. Paterson has insisted civil servants do not start a sentence with ‘but’, while ‘and’ should only be used once in any sentence. Refreshingly, he also advises “all sentences should be as short as possible” and jargon should be avoided. Paterson’s 10-point list instructs staff to avoid dashes and limit the use of brackets in the interests of simplicity.
He controversially stipulates that ‘and’ or ‘but’ should not be accompanied by a comma although some punctuation experts recommend the use of the “Oxford comma”, which precedes the final item in a list of three or more to prevent any ambiguity. For instance, The Times once published an unintentionally humorous description of a Peter Ustinov documentary, noting that “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800 year old demigod and a dildo collector”. Had the Oxford comma been employed, Mandela could still have been taken for a deity but at least would not have been described as a dildo collector!
