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,
Slovene punctuation punctuation is not changed when using dashes, so an inserted sentence before a comma is usually followed by a comma nonetheless, even though some might see this usage as rather pedantic. A dash at the end of a sentence marks an abrupt end, a breaking of thought or unwillingness to continue: In sentences without a predicate, a dash can represent the connexion between the subject and the object. A dash can introduce direct speech if there is no accompanying sentence before direct speech itself. Dash sometimes separates multiple surnames, though it is more usual to merely use a space. A