Serial comma preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution" of certain goods were activities exempted from the general requirement of overtime pay; the question was whether this list included the distribution of the goods, or only the packing of the goods for distribution. The lack of a comma suggested one meaning, while the omission of the conjunction "or" before "packing" and the fact that the "Maine Legislative Drafting Manual" advised against use of the serial comma suggested another. It said "Although authorities on punctuation may differ, when drafting Maine law or rules, don’t use a comma between the penultimate
Punctuation of English their cover letters. In contrast, closed punctuation uses commas and periods in a strict manner. Closed style is common in presentations, especially in bulleted and numbered lists. It is also frequently used in advertising, marketing materials, news headlines, and signage. The approximate average frequencies for English punctuation marks per 1000 words based on 723,000 words of assorted texts are as follows (as of 2013, but with some text corpora dating to 1998 and 1987): The apostrophe , (sometimes called inverted comma in British English) is used to mark possession as in ""John's book"", and to mark letters omitted in contractions,