In Search of Mrs. Hagel

After 15 years I can still name every teacher I had in High School. I owe much of the knowledge I rely on today to their tutelage. The memories I have of their classes range from blurry, general impressions to crystal-clear lessons that I can still recite today. One  of those lessons has shaped almost every day of my life since.

The class was journalistic writing and the teacher was Mrs. Hagel. Mrs. Hagel was younger than some of the teachers at Powell High who continued to lecture the same lessons from well-worn texts year after year. She brought a vibrancy and enthusiasm to her classes that I enjoyed. She instructed more as a mentor than as a teacher. As advisor to the school newspaper she had two classrooms, one with traditional desks and the other with large round tables that we would gather around to collaborate on group assignments, (very forward thinking in 1986 Wyoming).

I remember she was one of the first teachers to have a computer in her room. It was a Mac Plus that was used by Mrs. Hagel and her newspaper staff to layout the school newspaper with PageMaker and a LaserWriter (can you believe the LaserWriter cost $6995 back in 1985?). Although I wasn’t on the official newspaper staff, she would allow me access to her computer. I think even back then I was a bit of a geek and as such was pressed into service when the silly box with a keyboard and mouse was not behaving. I am solely responsible for installing the Moose on her computer. (That didn’t last long.)

The writing I do today is strongly influenced by her class. We discussed many usages of grammar and I call on them often. One that I remember fondly was the use of the serial comma. Only that’s not what we called it in her class; I’ve only learned that name for it recently. My memory of the lesson is vivid, for it seemed that she was giving me a nugget of grammatical truth that would set me apart from my under-achieving contemporaries. The lesson went something like this: “You know how as a freshman you were taught to separate each item in a list with a comma? Well, modern style calls for the omission of the last comma. So instead of snow, rain, and sleet, you can now just write snow, rain and sleet.” I remember thinking that Mrs. Hagel was on the cutting edge for giving us this piece of tradition altering knowledge. Because of the advent of proportional width fonts I had just unlearned the use of 2 spaces to separate sentences, so I absorbed the dropping of the comma readily. With her warning that the older style was still accepted and many would not embrace this new usage, I held my head high as other teachers marked my papers. I raised my nose and sniffed at the air as I saw my classmates stuck in the past constantly typing commas for which there was no need.

I have continued this practice unswervingly for the past 15 years. I had assumed that eventually the rest of the writing world would catch-up to us early-adopters and I would only see that final comma in the oldest of manuscripts. Except that never happened, instead [Pullout: ]  I see generous comma usage all around me. Perplexed, I went looking for an answer to this inconsistency. I found numerous discussions on the topic and they all led me down a path that I did not expect.

It appears that each comma of a list is very much required in modern writing style. The reason is quite sensible and has everything to do with clarity. Consider this, “Much thanks to my parents, Blake and Christa”, without the serial comma it could be interpreted, by those who don’t know my family, that Blake and Christa are my parents. When written like this, “Much thanks to my parents, Blake, and Christa”, it is clear that I am thankful to all 4 parties listed.

Numerous style authorities document serial comma use. The dissenters to this style are British guides and newspaper guidelines, namely the AP style guide. It seems that the space saved on a newspaper page by omitting the serial comma is enough to forego its use.

Could it be that she was teaching the AP style and I missed that part of the lesson? It was a class on journalistic writing. I don’t remember discussing many style guidelines that were reserved only for journalism, so this one should have stuck out if that was the case. Could it be that I was eager to differentiate myself from the other writers at Powell High School, so I ignored the part about its journalism only usage? My ego could be at work here. I can’t imagine that Mrs. Hagel got it wrong. (Although I think her husband was the editor for the local paper, hmm. Perhaps in her house AP style was the only one that mattered.)

Whatever the reason, I’ve been incorrectly skipping the serial comma for years. One only has to scroll back to my December, 9 post to see its misuse right on this page. I have begun using the correct style and soon it will seem natural. I doubt I will ever place a comma before a conjunction again without wondering if Mrs. Hagel is still teaching, what her students are learning about the serial comma, and whether she knows how far her lessons have reached.