Re: Formatting lists of things

["David Lodge" <dave cirt net>]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:05:15 +0100, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 12:38 -0300, Raphael Higino wrote:
> > First a silly note (and question too): AFAIK in English you'd just use
> > that last comma for disambiguation purposes, right?
> Actually, in English, whether or not you include the comma
> before "and" (we call it the serial comma) depends on whose
> style guide you adhere to.  If you want to follow Shaun's
> Guide to Perfect English (which I make up as I go along),
> then you always include the serial comma. :)

Actually, in American English you use the Oxford comma (so called after  
Oxford University's style guide). In other Englishes it depends very much  
on the style guide. Generally British English hates the superfluous comma  
unless it disambiguates the sentence (and then it'd be better to use a  
semi-colon as a separator), except for Oxford University (but they still  
advise using -ize instead of -ise).

dave