Wat this all is, to my eyes, is people putting form over function. If you care about the message, you consider the people receiving it and try to reduce ambiguity as much as possible. If you care about the medium, then you make trade-offs about aesthetics which may reduce legibility but appeal to some other quality that is being considered.

There's obviously a place for both. Poetry does not necessarily benefit by removing ambiguity. Technical manuals do. Depending on what the author is attempting to do, different choices may be made.

In contracts meant to define actions and behaviors, ambiguity is not beneficial (at least not for anyone that's not trying to swindle someone else). There are constructs or forms that can be used to reduce ambiguity, and they should be used where appropriate. For example, if a bulleted list is allowed, that removes quite a bit of ambiguity in some cases.

Unfortunately, for contracts we are forced to use an imprecise medium (natural language) to define what we want to be a precise set of constraints. There will always be some friction there where one for not accurately account for what's meant by the other. Additionally, accurately describing all relevant facets of reality that might apply is hard.

> “The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice and broccoli salad, followed by bread pudding with chocolate sauce.”

This just moves the ambiguity.

Is the tomato sauce over rice, with a side of broccoli salad? Or is the sauce over [rice and broccoli salad]?

In this case "rice and broccoli salad" doesn't really sound like a dish, but why the fuck wouldn't you just use a tiny piece of syntax to make it super clear, rather than relying on the reader hopefully having similar culinary sensibilities?

How does a comma alone fix the sentence I quoted though? It could then be read as the tomato sauce going over the bread pudding. I think if you really want super clear, restructure the sentence further.

The next day I enjoyed

  - pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice
  - boccoli salad
  - bread pudding with chocolate sauce.

There, I fixed it.

There's still ambiguity as to whether it's:

   (pan-roasted oysters) with (a tomato sauce over rice)

or:

   (pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce) over rice

I don't think there is. It is the second. The clear convention is that each meal item is a list element.

It's not clear to me.

> (pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce) over rice

I picture a bowl of rice, then oysters on top of the rice, and then tomato sauce poured on top of the oysters.

> (pan-roasted oysters) with (a tomato sauce over rice)

I picture a plate. On one half is oysters, the other half is rice with tomato sauce poured on it.

As someone who would never put tomato sauce on either oysters or rice, either are equally likely.

No, it's a list of two subsets contained in the set "meal."

     - main-dishes (x1)

     - side-dishes (x2)

The entree set has 1 item in it, the "pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice.The ingredients of "entree" follow the same hierarchical structure as the ingredients of "meal," so:

     -main-ingredients (x1)

     -side-ingredients (x2)
 

Since we're only talking about two sets here, a comma separating them is unnecessary. You could use one if you wanted, ("pan-roasted oysters, with a tomato sauce over rice") but then the syntax of the sentence would be off. You'd have a list of three things:

     -pan roasted oysters

     -a tomato sauce over rice

     -broccoli salad and bread pudding with chocolate sauce

This is logically inconsistent because the oysters, tomatoes, and rice comprise a single dish. The tomatoes and rice don't stand on their own but describe how the oysters are prepared and served, just as the non-entrees describe how the meal is served.

Lets compare:

ORIGINAL: >“The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice, broccoli salad and bread pudding with chocolate sauce."

OXFORD COMMA: > “The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters, with a tomato sauce over rice, broccoli salad, and bread pudding with chocolate sauce."

By structuring the sentence in that way, you erase any information about the value of the meal, and the relationships between its components. In return you ensure that someone won't think there was chocolate sauce on the broccoli salad.

This is likely just me, but I find sentences where the independent clause is bookended by an introductory and dependent clause to be inelegant. I never write them.

It's easily noticed when omitted improperly and more easily overlooked when done correctly.

Can you give an example?

> I think if you write a sentence that's highly dependent on the reader paying careful attention to where an easy-to-miss comma is, ... it's just a bad sentence.

Consider the function of the comma in "Time to eat, Grandma" vs "Time to eat Grandma".

Proper punctuation saves lives.

>“The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice and broccoli salad, followed by bread pudding with chocolate sauce.”

Your version is even more ambiguous:

Were the oysters separate from or included in the tomato sauce, and was said sauce served over rice, or was it served on the broccoli salad as well? Or perhaps it was a salad comprised of both rice and broccoli, over which a tomato sauce was poured - either with or without the pan seared oysters?

Just use the freaking commas - it makes everyone's life a lot easier.

My two cents against the use of the Oxford comma would be that all of Europe's languages are written without it. Surely if neither German, nor Spanish, nor Finnish, nor Lithuanian, nor Hungarian, nor Bulgarian - if none of them need the Oxford comma, English probably doesn't either.

Without regard to the actual conclusion, I don't one should necessarily apply lessons learned in sensible languages to this abominable offspring of German and French that we, for some reason, use.

> “The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters, with a tomato, sauce over rice, and broccoli, salad, followed by bread, pudding, with chocolate sauce.”

yum ;P

I would write "... and bread pudding with chocolate sauce as desert."

If a reader didn't know what bread pudding was, they could conclude that you had just chocolate sauce for your desert.

Trying to write English like you write code is pointless. It's edge cases all the way down and there aren't any shortcuts for gathering them all up except to assume a certain level of intelligence in your reader. Writers should focus on elegant, easy-to-read text that expresses their thoughts and the relevant details in a manner their main audience can understand.

I agree with the top-level commenter that the Oxford comma is used where a rephrasing may be better. Of course, most phrases can be better written, so it's largely meaningless. The Oxford comma is concise and unreasonably effective. It eases reading and should be adopted universally.

I'm a fan of hyphens:

"...oysters with a tomato sauce over rice, broccoli salad - and bread pudding ..."

I'm a big fan of em dashes, which—when used like this—signal a parenthetical remark.

Parentheses are way better than em-dashes for parenthetical remarks.

A set of parentheses make the syntax unambiguous.

An em-dash is “that multifaceted, all-purpose punctuation mark that can act as a parenthesis, comma, colon, semicolon or even quotation mark”.

Also I have spent too much time with computer languages, and I personally find the lack of spacing around the parenthetical em-dash to be an ugly syntax. Then again, I don’t closely adhere to the English rules of punctuation, because some of the standard rules make for ugly writing IMHO.

Mostly I try to avoid parenthetical statements because they are often a sign of lazy wishy-washy writing. I guess em-dashes are OK in novels where the text context usually makes the semantic meaning clear enough.

Edit: “The Chicago Manual as a style guide calls for no spacing before and after dashes. In British usage and in some style guides, spaced en dashes are used place of an em dash. Sometimes the space you see before and after the dash is actually a special character called a ‘hair space’ or a ‘thin space.’”. https://danieljtortora.com/blog/en-dashes-and-em-dashes-part...

Edit: “Most newspapers — and all that follow AP style — insert a space before and after the em dash.”. https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html

Edit: From C2: “U+2014 EM DASH is used to make a break—like this—in the flow of a sentence. (Some typographers prefer to use U+2013 EN DASH set off with spaces – like this – to make the same kind of break.) This kind of dash is commonly represented with a typewriter as a double-hyphen.”

Edit: Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash

Functionally, I guess the only advantage that the em-dash has is that it fails loudly and miserably when nested. For example:

Parentheticals -- already a bad -- although sometimes unavoidable -- habit of mine -- should never be nested.

Completely incomprehensible.

Parentheticals (already a bad (although sometimes unavoidable) habit of mine) should never be nested.

Dangerously comprehensible.

However, em-dashes do make the reading voice in my head change over to an old-timey radio announcer so that is cool.

> However, em-dashes do make the reading voice in my head change over to an old-timey radio announcer so that is cool.

That is cool.

When I read a parenthetical in parentheses it's like someone is talking to me while I'm trying to watch a movie: Even if the information is useful, it's annoyingly distracting. The same parenthetical in em-dash form doesn't have this same effect on me.

However—and I hope you'll bear with me here—for the most part the information in a parenthetical is either not needed or important enough to justify its own complete sentence.

I am a writer, and fully conversant with the fact that an em dash signals a break in the flow of a sentence, and one such use of a break in the flow is to use two of them to introduce a remark about the sentence itself, and then return to the sentence.

If you think parentheses are "way better," use them as you see fit. I can't imagine using both in the same sentence, but both are in my toolbox and I use whichever one suits the tone and content I'm communicating. (I often prefer parentheses for complete sentences.)

As for you spending too much time with computer languages and not liking the lack of spacing around em dashes, I believe you but don't share your taste at all. What am I to make of 1+(2*3)? Why do we not need spaces around operators and parentheses in arithmetic, but somehow it's ugly in prose?

Why are you ok with no space between the last word of this sentence and the interrogative? If you don't like a lack of spaces around em dashes, what do you think about "quotes?"

I am extremely familiar with en dashes and thin spaces. When writing text intended to be set with variable width, I put thin spaces on either side of en dashes but not em dashes. So I use thin spaces around an en dash 3 - 4 times a day.

What you have is a kind of taste. It's not universal. But it's yours, and if it serves you and your readers, it's fine.

Aren't semicolons the correct english list separator?

That's another argument in itself. I was always taught that phrases set apart by semicolons need to be capable of standing alone as complete sentences, so it's jarring to see them used to delimit nouns or noun phrases in a list.

At the same time, the language clearly needs a comma-like operator with higher precedence than the comma, and it's very hard to argue against pressing the semicolon into that role.

> At the same time, the language clearly needs a comma-like operator with higher precedence than the comma,

When a bulleted list is too much, I usually fall back on 1) this thing 2) this, this and this other thing and 3) this final thing. Gives you an easy way to refer back to each item too. Bit stuffy for causal writing though.

The semicolon is often used as a superlist separator, with commas used for the sublists.

Yes, that's the point -- it's often used that way, but not "correctly."

What's incorrect about it?

As I said, at one time it was taught that clauses separated by semicolons should have their own subjects and verbs.

I'm having palpitations at this.