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Comma, comma |Pad Patter 9.13

Umm, sometimes? I literally almost failed language arts in high school (none of it made sense to me!) so I couldn’t tell you whether I was taught it or not. When I was in grad school we had to use the APA style for writing papers. That citation and punctuation style was so ridiculously crazy that I never used it again. I've always had a difficult time with writing so just getting something down on paper that made sense to other people has been my goal. It took me 5 semesters to complete my thesis when everyone else did it in one. I’ll never go back to school again just for that reason alone!
 
For the most part, yes. Occasionally a comma isn't needed for clarity, so I'll skip it.
 
I was taught that it was optional if you had 3 items, but if you had 4 or more, it was required.

That said -- most weeks when the TLP newsletter comes, I want to add the missing Oxford comma to the list of designers at the end of the letter.
 
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For online/texting I don't always use commas but for work I have to be more careful. I don't always use the Oxford comma for short well defined sentences but if the Oxford comma helps to clarify the sentence then I'll use it. My boss isn't such a stickler for the comma but is more so for the colon and semi-colon, and also for double spacing for sentence punctuation.
 
I must have been taught to use the Oxford comma in southern California in the 1980's because it feels natural to me. If there's a pause in a sentence as I speak it, then a comma goes there, simple as that.
 
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