My Insignificant Grammar Rant

Everyone has something they believe in strongly. For example, I've seen countless posts on Facebook and Twitter about the government, the latest awards show, or Sunday's game. Here's my declaration of belief: I believe strongly in the Oxford comma. If you aren't sure what that is, look at the second sentence of this post.

Or at this sentence: I'm obsessed with office supplies, stormy ocean colors, and nail polish (from the About Me tab at the top of my page). Somewhere in the course of my school years, the comma before the "and" in a list of 3 or more subjects became unnecessary. It upsets me, confuses me, and I reject this change completely. See what I did there?
 
Now, I'm not a grammar expert by any means. I write conversationally and speak in run-on sentences that sometimes just trail off. I rarely correct others' spelling and grammar, unless you are one of my younger siblings, in which case, it is on. Okay, and I sometimes correct celeb's tweets and then change my mind and delete, not wanting to be that girl.

This change really did confuse me. One year they taught it, the next they didn't, changing the rules of my Language Arts class forever. For a long time, and sometimes still, I used it part time, depending on which part of my brain I was channeling. Seriously grammar, you can't do this to me! It's like Ziva leaving NCIS, why???

I list things often, you may have noticed. Commas are my favorite punctuation (followed closely by the parentheses). So that's what I believe in. Pretty profound, huh? And you thought this was going to be another controversial rant. We try to avoid that here.

Note: Via Wikipedia, it's called a serial comma. Take a look here at some of their examples on ambiguity that omitting this comma can cause. Or don't. We aren't about pressure here.