The Oxford comma and I have a complicated relationship.
I have no quarrel with the comma itself—it’s often a leisurely, much-needed pause in an otherwise long and droning serial.
On the other hand, well—it’s not A.P. style.
Throughout my academic career, throughout every piece of writing I’ve scribbled and submitted on a whim, I can say with certainty that I never cracked a style book. Never did it cross my mind to find out how to properly refer to senators, nor the best abbreviation for the states of the union. I didn’t know that “internet” only recently lost its capital I in the eyes of the A.P., and I didn’t care about the superiority of “OK” over “okay.”
Perhaps the persnickety details of one style guide aren’t enough to paint a convincing picture, but the point remains: I have long worked under the fatal assumption that creative writers don’t give a damn about the rules.
I’d read enough “experimental” writing—funky spacing, out-there poetry and bad-on-purpose-but-you-just-don’t-get-it prose—that I assumed creative writers (myself, of course, ranking squarely among them) reached down into their subconscious and produced a fully-formed, Pulitzer-winning first draft on command.
I thought that creative writing was a high art reserved for those born with arms long enough to reach it. I was, in a word, insufferable.
More slowly than I’d like, but with a finality I’ve never experienced before, I believe that I have finally begun to mature as a writer. Call it peach fuzz or that first bullseye zit between my eyes, but something’s there.
To be a student of English and a creative writer at the same time is a bit of a contradiction—to study authorities on writing while writing with one’s own authority seems like a misplaced bout of hubris. However, the truth and value to the study of creative writing is exactly that—it’s a process, it’s a contradiction and it’s the only way to find out who I am as a writer and a person.
The Pablo Picasso quote goes like this: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Echoed by the likes of Alexander McQueen and the Dalai Lama XIV, this revelation is like any other equivalent college-age epiphany—though one can hear it ad nauseam, it’s only learned and internalized through experience
For me, it began with A.P. style.
This year marks my third with the student newspaper at Fordham Lincoln Center, The Observer. This time two years ago, I submitted my first piece to the paper, expecting to never hear back from them. Instead, I got a Google Doc full of edits—and a saccharine note at the bottom encouraging me to “Keep writing!”
I hated it. People telling me that “this might work better” were purely critics to me—not individuals with my best interests in mind. I cringed at every last “lil awk” commented offhand on a compound sentence gone awry.
Every writer needs someone to tell them that their stuff is trash sometimes. When that someone gets to the heart of your writing—of you—and explains what can be improved, everything grows. The writer, the editor and the piece itself, I found, were beneficiaries of this process.
Slowly but surely, I worked through those edits. I tuned my voice, sharpened my focus and deleted every last one of those infernal Oxford commas.
I stuck with The Observer, becoming an editor myself. Then, I became Editor-in-Chief.
My new role is tougher than I ever expected. The idiom “herding cats,” when applied to 37 unpaid members of a biweekly newspaper staff, has become my favorite turn of phrase. My week invariably involves poring over 40 or so pieces of student journalism—op-eds, theater reviews and administrative exposés among them—and ensuring they’re fit to print.
Of the standards to which I hold my writers, most are traditional. Journalistic integrity, ethics, grammar, punctuation and the all-powerful A.P. dominate.
But some are my own. I know that writing worth reading is creative. It tells stories in unique ways and dares—not begs—the reader to listen.
When I pull up a new submission on Google Drive, I’m faced with what sometimes seems like two irreconcilable responsibilities. It’s my job to mold and trim the writing before me to conform to an unwavering, annually-issued style book—and I need to make it sound good. But it’s also my responsibility to retain the original voice of the author. Their style and unique perspective matter.
While they may not think they’re writing creatively, I believe that they are. Journalism is formulaic by trade, but it’s a lot less gloomy and gray when the ability to tell a story in a multitude of ways is treated as a strength, not a distraction.
Editor-in-Chief implies that I must know a little about how to improve a piece of writing. My title doesn’t imply the second part of the job, however—that experientially, I’m just as much a fledgling writer as any first-time contributor on our staff.
As I do my best to help my staff and contributors grow as writers—and, more importantly, grow as people—I find myself growing along with them. The lessons I try my hardest to instill in my peers are just as much for my own benefit.
I tell them to learn the rules, hoping that one day they will build a strong enough foundation to be able to break them. I tell myself to learn the rules, hoping that one day my strength—as a person and as a writer—will allow me to shatter the what I’ve known into just enough jagged pieces with which to build something new and meaningful.
With every lede suggestion, source attribution and endless debate over that damn Oxford comma, I told people what I myself needed to hear most. Learn the rules. Then break them—effectively, carefully, and creatively.