The Comma

Best part of that photo is the look on the dog's face, and the maniacal look on Ray's face. It's like the dog just now saw the headline out of the corner of his eye and is like, "Wait, what?"
And Ray just has this "To the oven with you, Rover! We've got company coming!" look in her eyes.

 

This is years old and fake.

 

Each of us being geeks in our own way, SF and I had several heated discussions about the use of the Oxford Comma. I, of course, was and am the ardent supporter of its use. After making my case for its importance, particularly in statutory interpretation, SF grudgingly admitted it may be important in legal writing. It is. I'm right.

A court's decision in a Maine labor dispute hinged on the absence of an Oxford comma

 

Oxford commas add nothing to clarity. If the items in the series are related, you don't need it. Always amazed that people tout the writing in the New Yorker when stories are just laden with commas. Instead of being rewritten for concision, the sentences often meander to no purpose other than to convey the impression that they should have been recast. Kill your darlings? Sure, but kill your commas, too, as much as possible.

 

Those examples are, comma splices.

 

Had a temporary project leader insist that we (or maybe just I) didn't need commas in true compound sentences. So for about three months, I had to go back and take out the ones before "and." That was irritating, but it did force a re-evaluation of how often to use commas.

 

Those examples are not comma splices, this is a comma splice.

 

As Riptide points out, those aren't comma splices. Comma splices join two independent clauses, so the two sentences should be able to stand alone like in Rip's example. What I presented is a compound sentence unnecessarily split by a comma. But thanks for playing.

 

That's bullshit. It's clear from the sentence construction that they are two separate things. There is only one conjunction in the sentence (or), so it clearly delineates between these things:
-- canning
-- processing
-- preserving
-- freezing
-- drying
-- marketing
-- storing
-- packing for shipment
-- distribution

The judge is grammatically wrong. It's not ambiguous at all.

 

Actually, you presented examples of compound verbs unnecessarily separated by a comma. A compound sentence has two noun-verb pairings. That does need a comma.

 

Fair. But they still weren't comma splices.