commas, serial

I want those apples, oranges, and pears.
I want mushrooms, onions, and sausage on my pizza.

I want to see you all using the serial comma. Your English teacher may have beaten into you that you drop the comma before the and. S/he wasn’t necessarily wrong. You can drop it or use it. I think it adds clarity to a sentence, and we should employ it.

Serious Eats world headquarters

Note the capitalization scheme here. Not “Serious Eats World Headquarters.”

Serious Eats, Serious Eaters

Let’s keep the use of “Serious Eats” and “Serious Eaters” to a minimum within posts. Too much self-reference starts to wear thin.

Also, in that vein, let’s set a style here. I’ve seen too much inconsistency when we use the term “Serious Eater(s).” It gets capped or lowercased with no rhyme or reason. From now on, if you *must* use it (see above), cap it: “All you Serious Eaters out there … “

state names

SPELL THEM OUT. There are only very, very rare instances where we don’t spell them out. So let’s not use the two-letter postal abbreviations. When they’re used as part of a city-state combo, you put a comma after the city name and after the state name: John Smith lives in the Walla Walla, Washington, area.

Believe me, if you think spelling them out is a pain and you want a shorter way, I can give you one — but you don’t want it because it consists of remembering the AP abbreviations, and we don’t wanna go there.