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This house puts forward the motion that use of the oxford comma is completely indispensible when precision is required in the face of ambiguity, and entirely unneccessary when there is no risk of ambiguity emerging in its absence.

Lets hear it for the Oxford Comma Compatabilists! HOO RAA!

The Oxford Comma Defendants/Persecutors may now come forward with their propositions, remembering to adhere to the laws of this chamber at all times.

This is what Mesomorph is on about, if you are confused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

I agree with Mesomorph. I doubt a huge and nasty debate will ensue.

We had quite a lively debate about it a year ago:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... ght=#31874
We also talked about that versus which and all kinds of differences between prescriptionists and descriptionists.

The use of the serial comma to avoid ambiguity is obligatory.

Otherwise the point is that commas provide visual clues as to how a sentence is divided into its constituent parts, just as pauses provide an aural clue.

And you don't want those constituent parts to be too small. Thus
I spoke to John, David, and Anna.
doesn't look right. The constituent parts are too small, and the Oxford comma is a distraction.

On the other hand
I spoke about the problems caused by artificial boundaries as a result of decolinization, the social tensions that resulted from the creation of a native administrative class more beholden to the colonial administrators than the ethnicity from which they were recruited and about the increase in tensions caused by the growth of an under-employed but over-educated native youth culture.
is crying out for a serial comma to make it clear there are three elements in the list.

And the sentences in between? Precisely that. In between; you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Stephen Jones wrote:And you don't want those constituent parts to be too small. Thus
I spoke to John, David, and Anna.
doesn't look right. The constituent parts are too small, and the Oxford comma is a distraction.

Hm, I've not heard this before. But "distraction" probably boils down to familiarity: an extra comma distracts you because you're not used to seeing it. A missing comma distracts me in the same way. (Not to mention I'm an American editor.)

American editors do love to have cut and fast rules for commas. The idea that comma use is often discretionary or has anything to do with the enunciation of the sentence is anathema to them. The important thing is to follow a set of arbitrary rules.

Thurber attacked his editor's overuse of commas in this famous anecdote:
A reader once asked James Thurber why he had put a comma after the word "dinner" in this sentence: "After dinner, the men went into the living room." Thurber, a comma minimalist, blamed the New Yorker's commaphilic editor, Harold Ross: "This particular comma was Ross' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up."

Ross had invented the arbitrary rule that a comma was necessary after an adverbial phrase of time, and thus wrecked the prosody of the sentence by putting one in. The truth is that there are few places where a comma is obligatory: between elements in lists apart from the penultimate and final when joined by a conjunction; before a non-defining relative clause, though even that is not straightforward; after a phrase in apposition; before direct speech or at the end of in place of a full stop. There may be the odd other example but I doubt it.

I rather like the comma added to Thurber's sentence, but if the men had a grammar debate or something equally pressing to get down to in the living room then it might be better without.