For the preservation of the Oxford / Harvard / serial comma

As part of my drive towards the use of logic-driven punctuation, I must heartily recommend this post on why it is "vitally necessary to prevent the extinction of the serial comma". As with everything else, it cannot be blindly used: there are cases where a blindly applied serial comma can create, not resolve, ambiguity. I repudiate such reprehensible misuse of punctuation. However, in most cases it serves to disambiguate lists and to clarify information, and in general I prefer to err on the side of too many, rather than too few, commas.


The purpose of punctuation in a language like English must be to convey something of intonation and reading pauses, which are critical to conveying meaning and which cannot be indicated in the language itself, since English lacks the kind of particles that German or Sanskrit possess. Punctuation is like salt: everybody has their preferred levels, but there is always such a thing as too much, and such a thing as too little, of it.