Serial comma The judge in the case said that 43 of the 50 U.S. states had mandated the use of a serial comma and that both chambers of the federal congress had warned against omitting it, in the words of the U.S. House Legislative Counsel's Manual on Drafting Style, "to prevent[] any misreading that the last item is part of the preceding one"; only 7 states "either do not require or expressly prohibited the use of the serial comma". In the following languages, the serial comma is not the norm and may go against punctuation rules: Serial comma In English language punctuation,
Comma splice splice, "Tastes in punctuation are not constant. It makes no sense to accuse Jane Austen of incorrect use of the comma, as no one would have levelled this charge against her at the time. Her conventions of usage were not ours". The author and journalist Lynne Truss writes in "Eats Shoots & Leaves" that "so many highly respected writers observe the splice comma that a rather unfair rule emerges on this one: only do it if you're famous". Citing Samuel Beckett, E. M. Forster, and Somerset Maugham, she says: "Done knowingly by an established writer, the comma splice is effective,