Spectator competition winners: poems about the Oxford comma

In Competition No. 3271, you were invited to submit a poem about the Oxford comma.

Thérèse Coffey’s much-maligned edict about this divisive piece of punctuation seems a long time ago now, but your entries – tremendous; well done – brought it all back.

Though my head was turned by Frank McDonald’s villanelle, John O’Byrne’s haiku and Janine Beacham’s double dactyl, it’s the winners below who scoop £30.

A memo arrived in the Coffey break for departmental circulation: ‘Whatever else may be at stake, the priority’s good punctuation.   ‘The NHS will have to wait, I fear this task has proved more pressing, I’ll set aside affairs of state, the Oxford comma needs addressing.   ‘I plan to ban it – no regret, for since promotion I’ve a rod to rule with – mindful of the debt I owe my parents, Liz and God.’   And in the shadows someone hissed, ‘Beware of being too pedantic, an absent comma in a list can yield a faux pas that’s gigantic.’ Sylvia Fairley

The Oxford comma? There’s a thing That strikes me as san fairy ann, Yet it’s the cause of quarrelling If you’re a strict grammarian.   Let nerds and pedants toil away, Constructing ropes of sand. A larger question, I would say, Is why the useless ‘and’?   Myself, I find I’ve often built A mounting sense of crisis, Jeopardy, horror, madness, guilt, With serial comma splices.   Why should the orthodox dictate How punctuation functions? Arise, protest, march, demonstrate. Free commas from conjunctions. Basil Ransome-Davies

I am an Oxford Comma and I’m expert in the art of separating clauses that are better kept apart. My presence in a sentence isn’t rigidly decreed; I’m invited by a writer as an answer to a need.   When brought about, I carry out a necessary function that clarifies an otherwise ambiguous conjunction. I may be seen to stand between two nouns that sit together to emphasise a verb applies to one and not the other.