The Oxford Comma »
My friend “The Letter G” sent me a message the other day about the Oxford comma, also known less pretentiously as the serial comma. It happens to be a bit of punctuation I find rather indispensable, although I freely acknowledge that I transgress several other rules of grammar regularly and am no authority on the subject. Still, the serial comma, which follows the conjunction before the last item in a list, is something the absence of which annoys me.
The Wikipedia article has arguments both for and against its use, with many somewhat amusing examples, and while such matters fall under the discretion of individual writers I do think that, logically, a separator in a sequence or set of items ought to be replicated uniformly between them, as in computer languages or math; that we may add “and” doesn’t mean we should drop the comma.
Indeed, I’m more likely to omit “and” than the comma; doing so rarely makes things ambiguous, and I often prefer the effect of concluding a list without a conjunction.