Jonathan Blake wrote:
On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Lawrence Ritchie <callmeinstead@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:I balk when I see your adoption of the serial comma. Talk about unconventional! (In the British publishing world -- and Lone Wolf is British -- virtually every publisher eschews its use).We've done much worse. :)
Heh heh!Speaking as someone who was born and lives in England, I remember being taught at school that you should never put a comma before 'and'--and even twenty years down the line I clearly remember sitting in the classroom thinking it was a stupid, inconsistent, nonsensical rule.
If I list things on separate lines, I don't place the final two items on the same line "just because".
If I separate a list using semi-colons, I don't "forget" to put one between the penultimate and final items.
So why the missing comma before 'and'? It has never made any sense to me whatsoever. Just because it has historically been omitted does not mean we need to continue the archaic practise. Project Aon is, after all, an independent, international publishing house based on voluntary contribution. And as such, we have our own style manual--which includes the serial/Harvard/Oxford comma. We are not a behemoth publishing house with 100 years of history. We don't need huge meetings to decide whether we're going to move forward and adopt a more modern grammatical rule. We were free to make such decisions very early on in our existence without the pressures of a back catalogue of many thousands of books, none of which utilised the serial comma. And as an 'international' organisation, we are not subject to local (grammatical) laws that we don't like. We haven't changed the spelling of British-English words to their ugly American counterparts (the word 'plow' makes me shudder), we are merely updating some of the punctuation to be more modern. After all, the way the previous publishers handled such matters is a moot point since they released the books riddled with errors and inconsistencies.
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