You may or may not have noticed the obsessive inserting of serial commas (as in commas after this entry, this one, and that last one) in Rico's blog posts, but it's all the fault of Rani Cochran, with whom Rico used to work at Apple in the old days, who came up with the famous serial-comma disaster to win the argument within the manual publishing group (a notorious bunch of word geeks) at Apple, a book dedication that could have used them:
I want to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
If you still don't see it, try it this way:
I want to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.
Comma-tose
ReplyDeleteOf your two examples
I want to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
I want to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.
I favor the example with more commas. I've always felt the former was incomplete and asymetrical somehow.
My motto is, like our founding fathers': when in doubt, punctuate!
--Bill "the punctuater", Champ