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A friend has pointed out that in an Oxford comma separated list, either every clause needs a verb, or each clause must be the object of the first verb.

This seems to make sense to me, but would this mean that this sentence is a comma splice?

"Next week, I will go to the gym, beach, and get a haircut."

The above sentence might be ambiguous, but are there any strict grammatical rules that this is violating? Does each clause have to have a verb, like so:

"Next week, I will go to the gym, go to the beach, and get a haircut?"

David
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Mike
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    Not a splice, but missing parallelism. The fix has parallelism but it's not ideal. Your friend's rule is a good start, but it's not accurate as is. – Yosef Baskin May 18 '23 at 23:06
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    I would find it more natural to say I will go to the gym and the beach and get a haircut or I will go to the gym, the beach and the hairdresser's. – Kate Bunting May 19 '23 at 07:48
  • It's possible to say "gym, beach" rather than "gym and beach" - see this question. But it wouldn't be the normal way of doing it, so while you could argue it's grammatical, it's suboptimal. – Stuart F May 19 '23 at 11:29
  • @StuartF All those examples have more than two items in the list, and omit the "and" that's usually used before the last item. I think it's still objectionable to omit "and" when there are just two items. But I'm not sure how to prove this with citations. – Barmar May 19 '23 at 20:14
  • May we have some different examples, please? IMHO There are too many other queries in this pair for it to be at all clear even that is an Oxford common, not one serving simply to clarify whether the barber's is at the beach. – Robbie Goodwin Sep 13 '23 at 12:14

2 Answers2

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As Yosef Baskin notes in a comment, the three conjuncts are not parallel. The second ("beach") is a noun phrase, while the third ("get a haircut") is an infinitive phrase. Your edit fixes the problem by making all three into infinitive phrases.

Because the first two conjuncts include "go to the", we can combine them into a single series with conjunction reduction. However, it is unusual to connect only two conjuncts with a comma (as Stuart F points out in a comment). This would be better:

Next week, I will go to the gym and beach and get a haircut.

Now one series contains two noun phrase conjuncts ("gym" and "beach") while the other contains two infinitive phrase conjuncts ("go to the gym and beach" and "get a haircut").

Whether you choose to use an Oxford comma or not is irrelevant, and your friend's rule is wildly incorrect. Here is a simple counterexample:

Alice, Bob[,] and Cindy are eating dinner.

MarcInManhattan
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To answer the question, I can't see anything wrong with the grammar to your original sentence, but it feels clunky.

Missing out the beach's article is - in my experience - unusual in spoken and written English. I would only expect it when an item in a list is plural and indefinite (He sells apples, oranges and plums) or when it is a proper noun (The three biggest continents are Asia, Africa and North America). This is as these nouns often already don't need articles.

Saying "and get a haircut" makes the sentence seem disjointed and adds ambiguity (it is unclear whether the haircut is happening at the gym, the beach or somewhere else). This can be helped by instead saying "and to get a haircut" which implies strongly that this is taking place somewhere else.

I think "Next week, I will go to the gym, the beach, and to get a haircut." flows better and would be the most common similar phrasing in spoken English (at least where I live in the UK).

Alternatively, you could change get a haircut to the hairdressers/barbers such that all the items in your list are locations (as suggested by Kate Bunting). I would still suggest using "the beach".

Ed_Silver
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