Oxford comma and more

I highly recommend Angus Croll's excellent posting entitled The Oxford Comma and the Internet here.
I agree with Angus. When it's needed it's important and when it's not, it's not. To my mind there is no point being dogmatically for or against. As Angus clearly demonstrates there are contexts where it clarified and others where it doesn't.

Update, 14 May 2013:
Americans apparently call it the 'serial comma'.
Excellent article entitled 10 Function of the Comma by Mark Nichol here.

Another great debate among punctuation freaks is where to put quotation marks in relation to punctuation marks like full stops (periods), commas and semi-colons. Most Americans always put the closing quotation mark after the other punctuation mark while many writers raised in the Commonwealth do the opposite.

Again, I favour of pragmatism over dogmatism. On each occasion I place the marks in what I consider is the more logical and/or more typographically aesthetic position... with apologies to those who favour systematic solutions over logic.

None of this is of much real importance, but it's quite amazing how pleasant it feels to state one's case in the form of a posting accessible to any and all.