Million dollar comma

Last week Friday, Lauren and I attended the the Fred Pryor mistake-free grammar & proofreading seminar. The class was a great refresher on grammar basics. It’s always nice to take time to stretch the old grammar muscle every now and then.

If you know me, then you know that I love when presenters have entertaining anecdotes that tie into the their lessons, and Dr. Faye Fulton was full of them. The story that stuck with me the most was a multi-million dollar lawsuit that was decided by a comma.

An extremely wealthy man passed away and left his estate to be divided evenly among his two nephews and one niece. In his will, it clearly stated that “Bob, Andrew and Leslie” would all receive an equal share of his estate. Bob contested the will stating that because there was no comma between Andrew’s and Leslie’s names, they were legally one entity. This means he would inherit 50 percent of the estate and the other two siblings would split the remaining 50 percent. The court ruled in favor of Bob.

Now obviously this judge was not aware of the Associate Press Stylebook, and I have no way of verifying the validity of this story - I wasted a full 30 minutes searching for it on Google - but, it still goes to show how important it is for our written work to be grammatically correct. A simple punctuation error could completely change the meaning of a sentence. And if a comma is the difference between $15 million and $30 million, you darn well better have it in the right place.