Resolved: The Oxford comma should be mandatory.

Unfortunately, my opponent was forced not to post arguments in the previous round. This was not his fault and I urge that voters do not judge his conduct unfavorably because of this. With that said, I will take advantage of of this round to expand on my responses in the last. I could not type everything I wanted to say because of character limits. R2) Oration / C2) Prosody I suspect that, when my opponent responded to my C2, he had his own oration point in mind. The implication is, then, that if people are forced to use the Oxford comma, they would be forced to pause between the penultimate and final items in oration, which will subconsciously change their regular speech for the better as well. I apologise if I have misinterpreted my opponent's intents here; if so, please disregard this argument. This argument, were it truly what my opponent intended, would be fallacious. Firstly, oration is usually hyperspeech. Even if people subconsciously make the switch to Item N-1 <pause> Item N (in a list of N items) after being accustomed to this style of oration, they will only change their hyperspeech (formal speech) and not their hypospeech. Secondly, it is usually spoken language that affects written language and not vice versa. This may not be the case in a language where the spoken and written languages are separate, but English is clearly not an example of that. Linguistic change occurs in speech, and this is reflected in the writing. The wealth of colloquial vocabulary that have increasingly appeared in print and the fact that spoken language precedes written language in human history are evidence of this. Writing is, indeed, just a 'symbolic representation of language through the use of graphic signs' (1); it is not possible for us to 'improve' the way people speak by changing how they write. R4) Reasons why you should use it The following paragraph was adapted from the article which announced the results of the survey my opponent cited: (2) The people who tend to prefer the Oxford comma also tend to be the kind of people who will tell a survey that they think their own grammar is excellent. Zealous, but not really the humble type. As Perlman said: Many people who think they are good at grammar are good at following what they think are the rules: Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, don’t end them with a preposition, etc. They may be less good at knowing why the “rules” exist, and I’ve yet to hear a coherent explanation of why you can’t do any of those things that didn’t involve Latinate references or such deep parsing of parts of speech and linguistics that the goal is lost — was the thought clear and unambiguous? Even the people who conducted the poll believed that Oxford comma proponents are simply more pedantic people who miss the point - clarity (although Perlman was evidently unaware of developments in linguistics in the past century or so). R5) Facts My opponent's reasoning in this section is not valid by any means. I will rewrite his arguments below: P1) The Declaration of Independence is a well-written document. P2) The Declaration of Independence uses the Oxford Comma. C) Well-written documents use the Oxford comma. This is an over-generalisation. It's like saying this: P1) The Declaration of Independence uses the phrase 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'. P2) The Declaration of Independence uses the Oxford Comma. C) Well-written documents use the phrase 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' My opponent has not proven that the Oxford comma plays a significant role in making people regard the Declaration Independence as well-written document. The use of the Oxford comma can easily be incidental. My opponent commits a similar fallacy in his Shakespeare argument. He claims that Shakespeare's use of the Oxford comma is related to the timeless nature of his works, as we can tell by his sentence 'Coincidence? I think not'. Yet that does not imply that his use of the Oxford comma is a cause leading to the timelessness of his works - which I dispute, considering that there are many who praise Shakespeare's writing but, among those, few if any who praise his writing for his use of the Oxford comma. C1) Descriptivism Although I stand by what I wrote in previous rounds about descriptivism, I have repeated my search in the two corpora, this time limiting my search to academic documents, which my opponent would no doubt consider to be superior, what with their higher editorial standards. The BNC is still overwhelmingly anti-Oxford comma: The COCA, although less flattering towards the omission of the Oxford comma, still displays a 1:3 without-to-with ratio, which still does not support the claim that the inclusion of the comma is a rule, rather than a preference (in the same way that such a proportional between 'he isn't' and 'he's not' would not indicate that one form is correct and the other form wrong): Again, the above screenshots are limited to academic content, which my opponent would likely consider to be far more careful about language than other sources. Conclusion The debate regarding the Oxford comma is a long one, and there have been numerous shots fired on both sides of the argument. Nevertheless, the reasoning supporting mandatory use does not have a leg to stand on. Contrary to popular belief, the mandatory use of the comma does not eliminate ambiguity in all cases; it may resolve ambiguity in some sentences, but it will also create ambiguity in others. In any case, syntactic ambiguity alone is not justification for mandatory use, for context often allows ambiguity to be sorted out easily by the reader. Only when the reader does not do this should the Oxford comma truly be mandatory. The array of style guides that support the comma is impressive, to be sure, but there are just as many that oppose its mandatory use, and allow its use for the purpose of resolving ambiguity. Furthermore, style guides only dictate conventions in the fields where they are regarded as authority. Although there may be a possible positive impact, however small, of the comma on oration, this is also no reason to make its use mandatory for all situations and contexts. I have shown through descriptive evidence in corpora that the omission of the Oxford comma is actually more prevalent than its use. Were my opponent to attack this argument, he would have had to attack the premise of descriptivism itself, that what is correct is not determined by whether there is a significant number of speakers who use it. Alas, he fails to do this, and instead asserts that the more grammatically adept use the Oxford comma - which I have proven false. Even if true, his argument does not attack the premise of descriptivism at all. I have shown, through sound waves of authentic speech, that the absence of a comma is actually a better representation of actual English prosody than its presence. My opponent disputes this, but does not explain why. I have also defended the omission of the comma on pragmatic grounds, including the fact that the comma confuses L2 learners and that it slows down reading. My opponent does not, thus far, appear to have provided valid arguments against my case, but I have shown all of his constructive arguments to be invalid or false. As such, the motion must not stand. I sincerely thank my opponent for the interesting debate. Vote Con! (1) The Study of Language, Yule, G. (2) http://fivethirtyeight.com......;