Hello.

Several of us have differing opinions on whether to use a comma or a semicolon in a list to separate numbers with more than three digits. The sentence is:

"The total number of calls that the Information Center staff answered were 2,881, 562, and 17,933 in November, December, and January, respectively."

I appreciate any sage advice that you or anyone can give. It would be even better if there is a link to a definite grammar or style rule regarding this.

Thank you so much.

Ha, great question. You're not going to get a definite answer on that one, I expect.

The ruling is when the list items themselves contain commas, then those commas can be outranked with semicolons. However, I have never seen this applied to numbers with commas. If you did decide to use semicolons, then - to be parallel - I'd expect semicolons in the follow up. So:

2,881; 562; and 17,933 in November; December; and January, respectively.

I think that's very untidy, but the original version offered needs a little bit of deciphering too. This is screaming bullets to me.


...as follows:

* 2,881 calls in November
* 562 calls in December
* 17,933 calls in January

That's pretty tidy.

More on using bullet points.

Hi,
I agree the semicolon is appropriate between a list of items that contain punctuation, and I do not have any trouble with it. However, a bullet list does a nice, clean job of identifying the details by month.