Re: Formatting lists of things

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 05/07/2007, at 7:35 AM, David Lodge wrote:

> 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).

I'm rather fond of -ize (and no serial comma) myself. ;)

British English covers more ground than just the U.K.

from Clytie in Australia

(vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa  
phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

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